I may not be good at products business, but I'm good at professional services business. I think this is the one type of business that open source will continue to support. It's always been this way for me, being in devops most of my career. I would always pick products that were open vs. closed, and this leads to some good outcomes such as the business you work for not being tied into a bunch of 3rd party contracts, more flexibility for the companies needs and integrations, and more employment.
Aside from that, for nostr in particular, the source we generate makes it easier for nostr to spread by training the AI with more code per-capita than other competing ideas like bsky. This snowball effect will eventually lead to more employment opportunities for working on nostr services than for other less popular or closed ideas.
Open source has always been a really hard business to model, very few successes vs. product businesses that draw investment easier and scale without more humans. However, it does still power most of the world's compute so, generally I would say it is possible to succeed. Look at openclaw, this is a good example. There were likely hundereds of product companies that built a similar thing all to be crushed in a few months by open source, and the dev did pretty good for himself. That's a unicorn exit for opensource, the likes of which I am not sure I've ever seen.
This is exciting times, I think nostr did a good job training the AI, and that means all the devs that put effort into it mostly-selflessly made this happen. The code lives on past the abandoned projects and becomes something new faster than ever was possible before.
The downsides and upsides are there for sure, it is worth coming up with an opensource business plan for your company if you choose to go this route so that you can succeed as a business. Blindly running an opensource business without a plan, is not likely to succeed and given it's a lot harder than a product company it should be given more thought and consideration vs. shooting from the hip.
cloud fodder and 121 others / cloud fodder
npub10n…ztl5h
2026-02-25 18:41:32 CET
in reply to nevent1q…zt26
Author Public Key
npub10npj3gydmv40m70ehemmal6vsdyfl7tewgvz043g54p0x23y0s8qzztl5hPublished at
2026-02-25 18:41:32 CETEvent JSON
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"content": "I may not be good at products business, but I'm good at professional services business. I think this is the one type of business that open source will continue to support. It's always been this way for me, being in devops most of my career. I would always pick products that were open vs. closed, and this leads to some good outcomes such as the business you work for not being tied into a bunch of 3rd party contracts, more flexibility for the companies needs and integrations, and more employment.\n\nAside from that, for nostr in particular, the source we generate makes it easier for nostr to spread by training the AI with more code per-capita than other competing ideas like bsky. This snowball effect will eventually lead to more employment opportunities for working on nostr services than for other less popular or closed ideas.\n\nOpen source has always been a really hard business to model, very few successes vs. product businesses that draw investment easier and scale without more humans. However, it does still power most of the world's compute so, generally I would say it is possible to succeed. Look at openclaw, this is a good example. There were likely hundereds of product companies that built a similar thing all to be crushed in a few months by open source, and the dev did pretty good for himself. That's a unicorn exit for opensource, the likes of which I am not sure I've ever seen.\n\nThis is exciting times, I think nostr did a good job training the AI, and that means all the devs that put effort into it mostly-selflessly made this happen. The code lives on past the abandoned projects and becomes something new faster than ever was possible before.\n\nThe downsides and upsides are there for sure, it is worth coming up with an opensource business plan for your company if you choose to go this route so that you can succeed as a business. Blindly running an opensource business without a plan, is not likely to succeed and given it's a lot harder than a product company it should be given more thought and consideration vs. shooting from the hip.",
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