The market is proven (and we have closed source competitors). The project is 20. It grows slowly but does grow. It also doesn't need to grow too much. Not every company wants to become very big. In the end, the company is (increasingly) profitable, employees get paid and customers are happy.

> Naturally there needs to be some incentive to keep the support staff in-house

The company, while not paying incredible salaries, pays decently and offers awesome working conditions. They perfectly know that we could get paid more elsewhere so it compensates by making it enjoyable to work at. And it works, many people have been there for a long time. Some of the first ones are still here.

More critically, the support team heavily relies on the product team for specific questions, and also supports custom projects built on top of the product, so it's not like they can just leave and create a competitive support business. The expertise in the finest details is with the product team and the infra team.

If someone can out-compete you by simply cranking the infrastructure handle on your source-code, doesn't that indicate that you're not using your built-in advantage of owning the feature backlog well enough?

Or, put another way, if the entire value of your business is in your source code, and the only thing I need to be able to compete is your code and some commodity infrastructure, then don't give away your source code?