I disagree strongly with this. Being Open-Source means more work most of the time: Taking care of the product for users, and making sure it's easy to install and well documented for people wanting to run their own instances.
If you do it simply because you think it's going to save you some work, it won't pay off. Do it because you want other people to benefit from it, but don't expect much from them and maybe it will just happen.
Oh yes, short term it's a little more work. You probably have to write a few tutorials, tidy the codebase up a little more than usual...but in the end, you open source because you want people to do work for you for free.
> If you do it simply because you think it's going to save you some work, it won't pay off.
A very immature blanket statement. Sometimes it will pay off, sometimes not. Depends on everything success usually depends on - open source is not some kind of magical exception. If you have a good product, but you feel like you won't be able to support it forever on your own or you don't expect or want to earn money from it anyway, you will open source it. In the end, it always boils down to wanting help with the workload though. If you had infinite time, you would just write everything yourself. I know I would, it's a lot more satisfying and interesting. But since we are all mere mortals with generally empty bellies, we open source secondary pillars of our livelihood. Nothing wrong with it, that's how it is.
If you do it simply because you think it's going to save you some work, it won't pay off. Do it because you want other people to benefit from it, but don't expect much from them and maybe it will just happen.