Tommi's Scribbles
Benefits of Keeping Things In-House
- Published on 2022-03-12
In my last post, I talked about some drawbacks of opensource. To continue with the theme, let me share some benefits of keeping things in-house.
You maintain a competitive advantage
One key thing for businesses is having a competitive advantage. These include price, positioning, and of course, product. Now, if your product is open source, anyone can copy what you do and you lose this advantage. Sure, reverse engineering is a thing too (e.g. rumor has it a country in the East is very quick in cloning new App Store games just replacing art assets). That doesn't mean you shouldn't make it as hard as possible for others to take away what should be your key advantage.
Open source development is tough to manage
The community of a popular opensource project can be a jungle. Or the project can be more like a dictatorship where the maintainer(s) ignore anyone outside the circle. The first option usually leads to a highly unstable and bloated product. The latter is in essence what an in-house closed source project would be like.
There's also attempts to make things more organized. I recently made an opensource contribution to a project by a large corporation. The contribution process is very structured. There's unit testing, code reviewing, discussions, and whatnot.
It almost feels smart. Except, what in an internal in-house setting would have taken a day tops ended up taking three weeks from creating the issue to a merged pull request. Had I had commercial products relying on that feature it would have been a disaster.
In-house development is for sure quicker and more focused than opensource development.
Conclusion
Aside from these two key benefits, I can see several other minor benefits to keeping things in-house. The touted benefit of opensource's better security also means malicious actors can review opensource code for vulnerabilities freely.
I'd also wager a guess there are more blackhat than whitehat hackers roaming the internet. That means the odds for someone finding a vulnerability in your code and disclosing it to you vs abusing the vulnerability are not in your favor.
I hope the next time you hear requirements to make your products opensource, you actually stop for a second to think if there is any benefit to you in doing so.