I'm noticing a growing trend where companies that open source their products seem to build larger customers, attract more contributors, reduce customer acquisition costs through word of mouth, and ultimately create larger businesses than companies that keep everything proprietary and eventually have a paid feature which brings them revenue without the worry of losing code.
Are companies doing this to actually contribute to opensource but rather for their benefit?
We spent months optimizing engineering speed.
Deployments improved.
Users barely noticed.
What moved engagement instead was fixing one confusing workflow.
What's something your team optimized that users never cared about?
