HACKER Q&A
📣 dimitrismrtzs

Is building a company around an open-source AI agent platform realistic?


I've been running a Proxmox lab with around 40 services for a while now. Over the past year I ended up building an AI agent platform that manages my infrastructure and handles business operations — documents, phone calls, scheduling, monitoring, that kind of thing. It wraps Claude Code CLI as the execution engine with custom MCP servers on top.

The whole thing started as internal tooling for a startup I was working on but honestly the platform ended up being way more useful than the startup itself. I'm seriously considering open sourcing it and going full time on it. The way I think about it is something like Home Assistant but for business operations — you self-host it and AI agents handle your operations.

My concern is sustainability though. I can't realistically maintain something like this on the side — if I do it I need to go all in. Has anyone here built or seen a real business around an open source tool in the AI space? What license would you go with? I've been looking at Modified Apache 2.0 (what Dify uses) vs BSL but honestly not sure what makes sense.

Would appreciate any advice from people who've dealt with this.