I meant if you give away the idea by open sourcing it, by the time you’re ready with your project the idea exists in dozens of forms already and you now look like a knock off.

Then it’s too late for you to have much success

First mover advantage, is this what you mean by first mover advantage?

This is course assumes you care about popularity/success of your product, if you only care about it existing and not performing on it then yes opening it up out of the gate makes a entirely too much sense… Even for my cynical ass