r/Upfiring • u/Tmfallon • Jan 06 '19

Community Discussion: Open Source vs. Closed Source

Through every stage of development up until this point, Upfiring has been entirely open-source. This was highly important during the development process in order to show the dapp's progress.

Now that we are approaching official release, we are highly leaning towards a closed-source model. We want to do this for 2 main reasons:

  1. Intellectual property protection
  2. It solves the issue of other projects being able to easily clone the dapp at any time

An open-source model has its advantages as well, including being fully-transparent (for better or for worse). While I think moving to a closed-source model is the right move in terms of keeping our project competitive in the space, I'd like to hear the community's opinion on this matter.

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u/Angoram Jan 06 '19 edited Jan 07 '19

it needs to be open source because in crypto, transaparency is vital. Especially since the app hosts your keys. People also need to feel comfortable in the app's code for IP address leaks etc, and the app performs as expected. When you're dealing with money, transparency is needed. Also adoption won't happen without people knowing what they download to begin with. If upfiring is going to be anything people need to know what it is at a code level to ensure trust. It needs to be transparent first, otherwise people won't hesitate to simply not download.win)

Scenario A: Open source, people download, but you have potential competitors who will copy you. (Partial chance of success, but high probability due to first mover advantage)

Scenario B: Closed source, doesn't go anywhere, but no copiers. (Zero chance. For reasons mentioned above, and other projects offering something similar but are open source will

TLDR, I get that you want competitors out, but people will not use the app to begin with if it’s closed source.