I'm a Systems Reliability and DevOps engineer for Netdata Inc. When not working, I enjoy studying linguistics and history, playing video games, and cooking all kinds of international cuisine.
Possibly controversial opinion, but as a potential investor, I would consider a company whose business model relied as much as you seem to imply on their competitors not providing exactly the same services to be nonviable.
Looking at it differently, yes, being open source may make life easier for competitors, but it can also make life easier for your developers, because it opens the possibility of getting external contributions that you don't have to pay for at all. Adding to the comment about security researchers examining your code, it's not unusual if they have all the source code for them to submit patches upstream (that is, to you) to fix the vulnerabilities they find. Similarly, unless you're in a niche industry, it's not unlikely that regular end users may submit patches to fix small bugs they come across.
Possibly controversial opinion, but as a potential investor, I would consider a company whose business model relied as much as you seem to imply on their competitors not providing exactly the same services to be nonviable.
Looking at it differently, yes, being open source may make life easier for competitors, but it can also make life easier for your developers, because it opens the possibility of getting external contributions that you don't have to pay for at all. Adding to the comment about security researchers examining your code, it's not unusual if they have all the source code for them to submit patches upstream (that is, to you) to fix the vulnerabilities they find. Similarly, unless you're in a niche industry, it's not unlikely that regular end users may submit patches to fix small bugs they come across.
Build a business, and earn investors' trust as a Quality Stock is hard, and it does correlate with funding.
But earning on Patreon or OpenCollective is another thing. It is hard to get much or reach the target, though.