> Code is free and open source, but 98% don't have the time/the knowledge/the will to self host
The vast majority of people who use GSuite won't understand or care about the OSS angle. Even if they do, they won't have the sophistication to examine your code. Thus, they must simply "trust" you, the same way they'd trust a corporation like Google.
People who really care about OSS are more likely to choose a more established solution for each use case (ie. Nextcloud for storage), and to self-host those solutions.
> will happily be us to manage and secure their data (like DropBox)
Again, if your edge over Dropbox is "we're open source!", I think this is just not compelling to most potential users who still want someone else hosting/managing their files. In that case, the open source transparency doesn't even mean anything, because the code in your repo isn't necessarily the code you're running on your servers.
In my case, I don't trust Dropbox, but I want their infrastructure. So I use a third-party encryption tool to ensure that they don't have access to folders I want to keep private. Best of both worlds.
The vast majority of people who use GSuite won't understand or care about the OSS angle. Even if they do, they won't have the sophistication to examine your code. Thus, they must simply "trust" you, the same way they'd trust a corporation like Google.
People who really care about OSS are more likely to choose a more established solution for each use case (ie. Nextcloud for storage), and to self-host those solutions.
> will happily be us to manage and secure their data (like DropBox)
Again, if your edge over Dropbox is "we're open source!", I think this is just not compelling to most potential users who still want someone else hosting/managing their files. In that case, the open source transparency doesn't even mean anything, because the code in your repo isn't necessarily the code you're running on your servers.
In my case, I don't trust Dropbox, but I want their infrastructure. So I use a third-party encryption tool to ensure that they don't have access to folders I want to keep private. Best of both worlds.