Opening or closing
Should we open our platform, standard, code or data to others, or keep control?
Opening a platform, standard, licence or dataset to outsiders, or closing it; licensing widely or keeping a technology proprietary.
36
57%
31%
11%
What the cases suggest
Opening tends to win when the opener controls something that grows more valuable as others build on it, and when outsiders need a credible promise that the rules will not be turned against them. Most of the openings that paid off were partial: JVC licensed VHS while competing on recorders, Google opened Android while keeping its store and services, Apple opened the iPhone to developers through a store it controlled, and Visa and India’s UPI put the rails in shared ownership while members competed on top.
What separated the decisions that worked
- Successes opened the layer others needed and kept a layer they could charge for. Failures either kept everything closed when a rival offered an open alternative (Betamax against VHS), or opened without rules and had to close again later (Facebook Platform’s access to friends’ data).
- Shared governance mattered when rivals had to join. Visa, UPI and schema.org worked because no single competitor owned the rules.
- Reversals of openness backfired more often than openness itself. The source-available relicensings of 2018 to 2024 and Lotus’s look-and-feel lawsuits spent goodwill without stopping the rivals they targeted.
Where this evidence is weak
Several cases are judged on effects decades later (Unix, Linux, the web), which flatters openness. Closed decisions that quietly succeeded, such as many proprietary enterprise products, are under-represented because the essays follow technologies that became public infrastructure.
By who decided
| Decision-maker | Cases | Paid off | Mixed | Backfired | Too early |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Market leader | 9 | 5 | 2 | 2 | 0 |
| Challenger | 10 | 5 | 4 | 0 | 1 |
| Young company | 4 | 2 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| Industry-wide | 2 | 0 | 0 | 2 | 0 |
| Researchers and communities | 7 | 5 | 2 | 0 | 0 |
| Public body | 4 | 3 | 1 | 0 | 0 |
The cases
Each links to the essay, memo or road not taken where the decision is described and judged, with its sources.
- Turn Bank of America’s licensing programme into an independent organisation owned by its member banks, with shared rules and no single owner A network rivals will join must be one that no rival controls.
- Launch VHS with longer recording time and license it widely to other manufacturers. A challenger can beat a first mover by making it easier for others to win alongside it.
- Announce that GPS would be made available for civil aviation once it was operational, after Korean Air Lines Flight 007 was shot down Opening infrastructure to everyone can create more value than any owner could capture by keeping it.
- Build a complete free operating system, and protect it with a licence (copyleft) that requires anyone distributing modified versions to share their changes on the same terms The rules of a commons determine whether it survives contact with commercial interests.
- Build hypertext with one-way links between documents on independent servers, with no central control, and accept that links may break. In a network, the system that is easiest to join often beats the system that is hardest to break.
- Build the kernel in the open and release it under a licence that keeps it free An open foundation that no competitor can own can become the default for everyone, including competitors.
- Release the Linux kernel under the GPL and accept contributions from anyone over the internet A small working thing, released early and maintained responsively, can attract the effort no single organisation could fund.
- End Selective Availability and commit to a civilian GPS signal at full accuracy, free of charge When a restriction has stopped working, removing it can be the most valuable thing an owner does.
- Open Amazon’s product pages to independent sellers, letting them compete directly with Amazon’s own retail offers Letting rivals sell to your customers can grow the whole market you control.
- Open the iPhone to outside developers only through an App Store in which Apple reviews every app, distributes it and takes 30 percent of paid sales Safety and simplicity can open a market, but whoever controls the gate will eventually be judged on how they use it.
- Release the Android operating system as open source, while keeping its app store and key services proprietary and licensed to phone makers Giving away the layer you do not need to own can secure the layer you do.
- Allow only web apps at first, then reverse course and open a native App Store Being willing to reverse a public decision quickly can matter more than getting it right first.
- License the operating system to many manufacturers If your goal is reach, let others build on your platform at prices you could never hit yourself.
- Call publicly on the major record labels to abolish copy protection (DRM) on music sold online, rather than opening Apple’s own DRM to competitors. When you are pressured to change something another party requires, it can be more effective to propose removing the requirement than to defend it.
- Keep Adobe Flash off the iPhone and iPad for good, and explain the decision publicly as a choice for open web standards, battery life, reliability and touch. When you say no to something customers ask for, explain the reasons in the customer’s terms (battery, crashes, touch), not only in strategic terms.
- Argue that Google should treat every product as a platform, as Amazon did after Jeff Bezos required every team to expose its work through service interfaces. Products that expose clean interfaces can become platforms; products that do not stay products.
- Launch schema.org, a shared, simple vocabulary for structured data, rewarded by richer appearance in search results. Adoption follows incentives more reliably than it follows elegance.
- Build an instant payment system owned by a not-for-profit company of banks, open to any bank and to third-party apps, using simple addresses instead of account numbers Build the rail as a commons and let competition happen on the trains.
- Store notes as plain Markdown files on the user’s own computer Letting users leave easily can be the reason they stay.
- Release a strong reasoning model openly, with a technical report emphasising low training cost In a market that assumes scale is the only advantage, a credible demonstration of efficiency can move more than a better product.
- Not to seek a patent on the electronic spreadsheet When you create a new category, assume it will be copied, and plan your advantage around speed and distribution, not legal protection.
- Accept mail from any server and believe whatever it says about the sender When you choose permissive defaults to grow, design the mechanism for tightening them before you need it.
- Standardise Common Lisp so that Lisp programs could run on many machines, including general-purpose ones. Standards that help your users can also dissolve your hardware advantage; plan for that.
- Deliberately degrade the accuracy of the public GPS signal through Selective Availability Degrading a shared good to deny it to a few tends to tax everyone and stop no one.
- Release the source code of its web browser, Communicator, under an open licence Opening a product can preserve its future even when it cannot save its owner.
- Release anonymised viewing data and offer $1 million to anyone who could improve its rating predictions by 10 percent Optimise for the decision the business will face when the work is done, not the one it faces now.
- Open the social network to outside apps with broad access to users’ data and their friends’ data, then progressively restrict it Developers who build on your platform are betting on your future rules. Generosity you cannot sustain is a debt.
- Allow Android users to install apps from sources other than Google’s own store Openness on paper is not openness in practice if the defaults and contracts point one way.
- Publish the Transformer architecture openly, in keeping with academic norms Publishing a breakthrough is a strategic choice; if you share the idea, your advantage has to come from how fast you turn it into a product.
- Withhold the full GPT-2 model over misuse concerns and release it in stages When a risk is new and hard to measure, a reversible, staged release buys information cheaply.
- Release capable language models with downloadable weights that others could run and modify If a technology complements your business rather than being it, giving it away can weaken competitors more than selling it would strengthen you.
- Launch Betamax on Sony's own design and seek partners to adopt it, rather than co-developing a shared standard with rivals before launch. In a market with network effects, the size of the coalition matters more than the quality of the founder's design.
- Sue makers of compatible spreadsheets for copying 1-2-3’s menus and “look and feel” The habits your users have learned are a moat only while they choose to stay; suing to keep them rarely beats giving them a reason to.
- Pursue Napster in court until it closed, rather than license it as a paid service, even after Bertelsmann broke ranks to back a membership version When customers have shown what they want, suing the messenger protects rights but rarely the business.
- Change licences from open source to source-available terms that prevent cloud providers from offering the software as a service In a commons, the right to fork is the community’s veto, and changing the rules invites its use.
- Release the weights of its large language models for broad use under a custom licence, rather than offering them only through an API Openness can be a strategy as well as a principle, and the two are worth telling apart.
Other kinds of decision
- Business model and pricing
- Make, buy or partner
- Acquisitions and sales
- Technology bets
- Product design
- New categories and markets
- Distribution and positioning
- Focus, exit and investment
- Trust, safety and privacy
- Executing large change
- Organisation and governance
- Public rules
Shrikant Kumar. “Opening or closing.” The Telos Decision Record, Telos, version of 2026-11-03. https://shrikantk.com/record/open-or-close/