What led the founders to adopt an open-source model for Appsmith, and how do they view the role of open source in the context of internal tool SaaS?

The main reason why we decided to do open source was that we realized people needed something they could host on their own servers. That was really essential, because for an application builder like Appsmith or other players to be successful, it needs to be easy for them to connect a tool with their PostgreSQL or MySQL database—otherwise, they cannot easily build an application. 

When you have a cloud hosted service, the developer basically needs to go to the broad DB and white-list certain IPs and then, ensure that the cloud hosted provider can access their data. But this actually opens up more interfaces where there is more risk. The more you expose your DB to the internet, it simply is more likely that it's going to get attacked.

That's why we realized, “Hey! If it's open source, it communicates two things to developers. Number one, it's self-hosted. But number two, the source is available.” This means that if you run into a bug, you can actually go in and figure out, “Hey! Why does the bug arise?” If you want to extend it because you're not happy with something that exists, you want to modify it or you want to add something new to it, it's easy for you to go on and do that. 

If Appsmith has a data source that's missing, that's not a limitation for our users because they just go on and contribute a data source. If they have a widget missing, they just go on and contribute a widget. It's like it's giving power to that engineer versus when it's proprietary, you're taking a lot of control away from that user. 

Proprietary or open source, it wouldn't matter if it was a business user. If the user was a non-technical user, I don't think they would care that much about proprietary versus open source, but as soon as we're focused on developers and the technical users as our audience, they immediately identify the advantages that come with something that's open source.