Open Source Opens Doors: The Business Strategy Behind Giving Away Code

TL;DR: Open sourcing isn't just giving away code—it's a powerful business strategy. The strategic advantages include enhanced trust with security-conscious enterprises, technical super-users driving precise product evolution, and accelerated development velocity. Apache 2.0 license proved optimal for maximizing adoption while providing reasonable competitive protection. _ The idea to open source Vexa - a meeting assistant for Google Meet, Zoom, and MS Teams - found me during a period of practicing happiness meditation. While I've always used open source heavily as all software engineers do—every component of Vexa was built upon open source foundations from Python to Docker, from Postgres to Qdrant—I hadn't been curious enough to research it as a business model. After somewhat a year of following the "talk to user - make MVP" VC mantra, a realization struck me: open source users aren't just free product users—they're super-users who will steer product evolution, eliminating guesswork. This insight led me to reach out to fellow open source founders to learn more. I listened to podcasts, researched companies like Cal.com and Qdrant, spoke to incredible founders like Hamzah Chaudhary at Lightdash, and studied other relatively new startups that had gained significant traction through open source. Trust as Business Strategy Meeting notes are extremely sensitive data, and this sensitivity increases with the size of the organization. In this domain, transparency creates an immediate business advantage that closed-source competitors simply cannot match. As Hamzah Chaudhary from Lightdash told me, you can't even initiate conversations with certain enterprise companies if your solution isn't open source—transparency is a prerequisite for engagement in high-security sectors. Why You Will Probably Not Lose Anything by Going Open Source Open Source Creates Super-Users Who Drive Precise Product Evolution In the traditional product development cycle, founders often struggle with the "talk to user - make MVP" approach because standard user feedback is limited in quality and often binary (using/not using). Most users lack the technical understanding to articulate what they want beyond surface-level features. Open source changes this equation dramatically. Your open source users aren't just passive consumers—they're stakeholders - engineers, developers, and technical professionals who: Understand your codebase at a fundamental level Bring diverse industry perspectives that your core team lacks Contribute actual issues and code solutions rather than vague feature requests Test hypotheses in their own environments and report concrete results This transforms product development from a black box of guesswork into a transparent, community-driven process where the most valuable improvements rise to the top naturally. Instead of the traditional approach where you might spend months building features nobody wants, open source users provide immediate, actionable feedback on what's truly valuable. While these users access your product for free, they contribute value far beyond what they extract—and many eventually become paying customers once they've integrated your solution deeply into their workflows. Free deployment of an open source product isn't truly free anyways—organizations need computation resources and expertise to deploy and maintain instances. Who's the obvious choice to hire for implementation and support? You! This creates an opportunity to productize your expertise into turn-key solutions, eventually evolving into SaaS offerings. Your SaaS solution serves another cohort of users who may have no interest in whether it's open source, but will love your product that's ahead of competition—an advantage derived from the open source nature of the product. The label of "open source" on your product and the knowledge that it's being verified by thousands of independent contributors serves as both a trust signal and quality proof for potential customers. After extensive research, we started to publish our codebase publicly just two weeks ago—initially without a license—to gather feedback from seasoned open source contributors. Their response was unanimous: we needed a formal license immediately. Today, we officially added our Apache 2.0 license, marking the culmination of a strategic decision process focused on business growth. Why We Chose Apache 2.0 License A license is the direct reflection of its business model. The two aren't merely related—they're inseparable. Each licensing decision reveals fundamental strategic choices about how you plan to create and capture value. This is where you need to clearly understand your objectives for licensing and your business model. Our primary objectives were explicit: Maximize adoption across enterprise customers, enthusiasts and startups to build on top of Vexa (top priority) Establish protections against direct competition for

Mar 21, 2025 - 19:44

Open Source Opens Doors: The Business Strategy Behind Giving Away Code

TL;DR: Open sourcing isn't just giving away code—it's a powerful business strategy. The strategic advantages include enhanced trust with security-conscious enterprises, technical super-users driving precise product evolution, and accelerated development velocity. Apache 2.0 license proved optimal for maximizing adoption while providing reasonable competitive protection.

_
The idea to open source Vexa - a meeting assistant for Google Meet, Zoom, and MS Teams - found me during a period of practicing happiness meditation. While I've always used open source heavily as all software engineers do—every component of Vexa was built upon open source foundations from Python to Docker, from Postgres to Qdrant—I hadn't been curious enough to research it as a business model.

After somewhat a year of following the "talk to user - make MVP" VC mantra, a realization struck me: open source users aren't just free product users—they're super-users who will steer product evolution, eliminating guesswork.

This insight led me to reach out to fellow open source founders to learn more. I listened to podcasts, researched companies like Cal.com and Qdrant, spoke to incredible founders like Hamzah Chaudhary at Lightdash, and studied other relatively new startups that had gained significant traction through open source.

Trust as Business Strategy

Meeting notes are extremely sensitive data, and this sensitivity increases with the size of the organization. In this domain, transparency creates an immediate business advantage that closed-source competitors simply cannot match.

As Hamzah Chaudhary from Lightdash told me, you can't even initiate conversations with certain enterprise companies if your solution isn't open source—transparency is a prerequisite for engagement in high-security sectors.

Why You Will Probably Not Lose Anything by Going Open Source

Open Source Creates Super-Users Who Drive Precise Product Evolution

In the traditional product development cycle, founders often struggle with the "talk to user - make MVP" approach because standard user feedback is limited in quality and often binary (using/not using). Most users lack the technical understanding to articulate what they want beyond surface-level features.

Open source changes this equation dramatically. Your open source users aren't just passive consumers—they're stakeholders - engineers, developers, and technical professionals who:

Understand your codebase at a fundamental level
Bring diverse industry perspectives that your core team lacks
Contribute actual issues and code solutions rather than vague feature requests
Test hypotheses in their own environments and report concrete results

This transforms product development from a black box of guesswork into a transparent, community-driven process where the most valuable improvements rise to the top naturally. Instead of the traditional approach where you might spend months building features nobody wants, open source users provide immediate, actionable feedback on what's truly valuable.

While these users access your product for free, they contribute value far beyond what they extract—and many eventually become paying customers once they've integrated your solution deeply into their workflows.

Free deployment of an open source product isn't truly free anyways—organizations need computation resources and expertise to deploy and maintain instances. Who's the obvious choice to hire for implementation and support? You! This creates an opportunity to productize your expertise into turn-key solutions, eventually evolving into SaaS offerings.
Your SaaS solution serves another cohort of users who may have no interest in whether it's open source, but will love your product that's ahead of competition—an advantage derived from the open source nature of the product.
The label of "open source" on your product and the knowledge that it's being verified by thousands of independent contributors serves as both a trust signal and quality proof for potential customers.

After extensive research, we started to publish our codebase publicly just two weeks ago—initially without a license—to gather feedback from seasoned open source contributors. Their response was unanimous: we needed a formal license immediately. Today, we officially added our Apache 2.0 license, marking the culmination of a strategic decision process focused on business growth.

Why We Chose Apache 2.0 License

A license is the direct reflection of its business model. The two aren't merely related—they're inseparable. Each licensing decision reveals fundamental strategic choices about how you plan to create and capture value. This is where you need to clearly understand your objectives for licensing and your business model.

Our primary objectives were explicit:

Maximize adoption across enterprise customers, enthusiasts and startups to build on top of Vexa (top priority)
Establish protections against direct competition for our managed service (lower priority)

License Options Matrix

Based on our research and business objectives, we evaluated several license options against key criteria:

License	Adoption Potential	Competition Protection	Enterprise Acceptance	Community Appeal
MIT	★★★★★	★☆☆☆☆	★★★★★	★★★★☆
Apache 2.0	★★★★☆	★★★☆☆	★★★★★	★★★★☆
BSD 3-Clause	★★★★★	★★☆☆☆	★★★★☆	★★★★☆
GPL v3	★★☆☆☆	★★★★★	★★☆☆☆	★★★☆☆
MPL 2.0	★★★☆☆	★★★☆☆	★★★☆☆	★★★☆☆
BUSL	★★☆☆☆	★★★★★	★★☆☆☆	★☆☆☆☆
SSPL	★☆☆☆☆	★★★★★	★☆☆☆☆	★☆☆☆☆

The Apache 2.0 license provided the optimal balance between enterprise acceptance, reasonable competitive protection through its patent provisions, and strong community appeal—aligning perfectly with our primary objective of maximizing adoption.

Leave a comment if you want a detailed report on the reasoning behind our license choice—I've prepared a comprehensive document with all the details.

Things Might Change in the Future - Evolution Patterns

Our business strategy was informed by studying how other commercial open source companies have evolved their licensing approach.

Even though code published under a specific license will always be governed by that license, for future versions you have full rights to change the license. Here are key lessons from industry leaders:

Elastic: Started with Apache 2.0, later changed to more restrictive licenses specifically to address Amazon offering Elasticsearch as a service without contribution.

MongoDB: Shifted from AGPL to SSPL to protect against cloud providers capturing value without contributing back, noting that "once an open source project becomes interesting, it is too easy for large cloud vendors to capture all the value but contribute nothing back."

HashiCorp: Changed from MPL 2.0 to BUSL, triggering the OpenTofu fork and demonstrating the risk of community fragmentation with license changes.

These patterns revealed the strategic flexibility of starting with a permissive license while maintaining options for future adjustments.

Business Results After Just Two Weeks: Very Promising

The business impact of our open source strategy is already materializing:

30% response rate from direct outreach on LinkedIn (very high!)
Detailed code review reports from open source enthusiasts with a lot of insights provided
Significant improvement in code quality based on higher internal standards and external feedback

Call to Collaboration

Would love to hear from other founders about your open source licensing journeys. What licenses have worked for your business model? What challenges have you faced in implementation?

The future of meeting assistants is open source! We invite you to:

Try Vexa beta service at vexa.ai!
Visit, star, clone, or fork Vexa on GitHub: github.com/Vexa-ai/vexa
Share your feedback publicly or directly with me on LinkedIn
Deploy Vexa in your organization and share your experience
Build innovative solutions on top of Vexa