Ask HN: Are there downsides to making all our source code publicly available?

Then again, even that might be ok if you are covering a geographic area, for instance, and already have good penetration there.

In general, I do want to believe we can find business models where hiding the code is not important, and we can let our users contribute back, so I wonder how much of the business model you can share here?

A good balance can be open sourcing an internal library or two, so you get some of the benefit without the work needed to polish the mass of your core code.

With regard to recruitment, I think the openness is mostly a benefit to employees, because they can point directly at their work product like a portfolio. So it helps recruitment, but it's about them not about your cool problems.

Making your source code open should be done only if its use and modification will increase your user base and thus revenue. This can be in the form of "hey free to try for a company but once we build production, we will need to move to paid subscription", or "hey i can use this on my local computer but I want to set it up in the cloud to be accessible publicly, for which I need to use the paid product".

Money is a better tool to improve recruitment, in all probability there are better code bases for random people to learn from, and your principles are only opinions at heart.

To put it another way, if it was obviously a good idea, you would not have a question.

Good luck.