We're often asked this question: "But do you actually earn anything from open source?"
The short answer is yes. The long one requires taking apart a couple of wrong ideas about what doing open source really means in 2025.
Open source doesn't mean free
Let's start here because it's the biggest misunderstanding. When you release an open source project you aren't giving your work away. You're making a precise choice: making transparent how what you've built works.
The code is available, yes. But that isn't the point. The point is that anyone can check what it does, how it does it, and whether there are problems. In a world where software touches every aspect of people's lives (from healthcare to payments, from education to entertainment), transparency isn't altruism. It's responsibility.
And from a business point of view? It's also an enormous competitive advantage.
The problem with the closed model
When you develop proprietary software you have one clear goal: ship the next feature before your competitors. It works, no question. It's been the dominant model for decades.
But it has obvious limits. Nobody from the outside can tell you "this doesn't work the way it should" or "have you considered this use case?". Worse: nobody can ask you whether what you're building is ethical, safe, or actually needed by people.
In the world of AI this approach becomes risky. We're building systems that make decisions in our place, that influence hiring, loans, medical diagnoses. Doing it behind closed doors, with no possibility of scrutiny, no longer makes much sense.
Security isn't hidden
Take cryptography. AES, RSA, the elliptic curves that protect your credit cards online: they're all open source. The algorithms are public.
Anyone can study them, analyse them, try to break them. This seems counterintuitive. If you want something to be secure, shouldn't you keep it secret? No. It works exactly the other way round. Security through obscurity, as the techies call it, is a bluff. Sooner or later someone finds the weak point. And when that happens, you're done for, because you have no idea how deeply the system is compromised.
Open source cryptographic algorithms, on the other hand, are tested by thousands of security researchers around the world. If there's a hole, someone finds it. And it gets fixed before it becomes a serious problem. Bitwarden, one of the most widely used password managers in the world, works this way. The code is public. You can check exactly how your passwords are handled. And that's precisely why people trust it. Transparency isn't the problem. It's the solution.
How the open source business model works
Linux is open source. Practically every server in the world uses it. Android is open source. It runs on billions of devices. Kubernetes is open source. It's the de facto standard for orchestrating containers.
These projects didn't survive out of philanthropy. They became so widespread precisely because they're open source.
Here's the mechanism: you release the software for free. You build a community of people who use it, who find bugs, who suggest improvements, who contribute code. When your tool becomes essential to thousands of companies, those companies need enterprise support, consulting, customisation, training.
Red Hat built a multi-billion-dollar company on Linux. Not by selling Linux (which is free), but by selling services around Linux.
It isn't a new model. It's just less immediate to grasp than "I make software and sell it".
Community-driven, not trend-driven
There's another important difference. When you develop in open source mode you don't chase the trend of the moment. You build for the concrete needs of the community that uses your tool.
This changes everything. The open source projects that really work are the ones that solve real problems, not the ones that implement the latest buzzword. They're tools that change the way people work, not features that only exist to make commercial demos.
In the field of AI this approach is becoming ever more relevant. Projects like Meta's Llama are showing that it's possible to develop powerful language models transparently, letting the community verify, improve, and raise ethical questions.
Quinck's choice
For us, doing open source isn't ideology. It's pragmatism.
We want to build software that lasts. That can be verified. That solves real problems and not just the ones we imagine. And we want to do it together with people who share these goals.
This doesn't mean everything we do is open source. But when it makes sense to release something publicly, we do. Because a well-made open source project brings you feedback you would never have got otherwise. It brings you contributors. It brings you visibility. And in the long run, it brings you business too.
In practice
If you're weighing up whether to adopt an open source model for your next project, ask yourself:
- Does your software solve a problem that many people have?
- Could you benefit from outside contributions?
- Is transparency a value for your users?
- Can you build services around the base software?
If the answer is yes to two or more of these questions, open source might be the right path. Not because it's "the right thing to do", but because it's the strategy that works best.
