What are the advantages of making a product open source?

DOLEMAN

Hello,

I have written a fairly advanced web product. I'm not sure if I would ever be able to sell it, but I know if I made it open source lots of people would use it.

However, I'm worried that if I make this product open source it will kill any future "value" the product might have. In essence, I'm worried it could kill potential money I could make from this product (keeping it closed source could make me $$$ from it in a few years.)

Anyway, what do you guys think? Is it worth making something open source, or is it simply giving away something for free?

AndrewMc

Well, making it open source will allow other people to develop and improve it, contributing back those new features and fixes for free. How much this happens depends on the popularity of it, but even two or three interested people out there will give you another perspective on the product's usefulness and potential. Conversely, this means other people can take your program and make money from it themselves without you gaining directly from it. Although, bear in mind they may not be in your target market anyway, so whether you've lost much in that regard is debatable.

Most of the ways people make money from an open source project is through support. If people are willing to pay you to set something up and maintain it for them, how much does it matter (to you or to them) whether they're paying for you, or paying for it? It may even be a selling point to say that they're less tied to you or the product, but that you're still going to be the best person for the job anyway.

esskay

Also, if your product does make it big, if it is open-source it enables people to deveolp mods/add-ons for it increasing its appeal to consumers. Like the firefox plug-in for this site

wingnut

There are also implications if you used open source tools in the application. For example if you use MySQL and don't make your product open source you will have to pay for it. Companies will expect you to know about such licencing issues and have them sorted out before they go ahead with hiring you.

rogue-entity

You can always dual-licence your product too. You retain the copyright to your software, and as such you are free to licence it as GPL if you wish while at the same time licencing it under a MS-Style licence too. Therefore you can forbid companies, governments and similar entities from using your software without paying, but at the same time providing an open source version for people that is GPL'd. Like what MySQL is doing.

larryone

AndrewMc wrote:

Conversely, this means other people can take your program and make money from it themselves without you gaining directly from it.

I thought the GPL protected against this??

aidan_walsh

larryone wrote:

I thought the GPL protected against this??

No. The GPL explictly states that a person may charge for software, they just have to make the source available. They do place a cap on the amount the person can charge, and this cap is going to rise for GPL3 adopters.

aidan_walsh

esskay wrote:

Also, if your product does make it big, if it is open-source it enables people to deveolp mods/add-ons for it increasing its appeal to consumers. Like the firefox plug-in for this site

What often gets lost behind the romantic visuals of popular open source projects, is that the majority of the biggest projects have financial backing similar to many popular closed source projects, not to mention as many dedicated, full time coders i.e. Eclipse is funded and maintained largely by IBM, and most of the big Linux distributions have massive, private financial backers and full time staff.

Its every bit as difficult for an OS project to make the big time as it is for a closed source one, for exactly the same reasons. Mozilla are really a special case, and in many ways not indicitive of the OS scene, even though they did start out with backing and software developed at Netscape.

AndrewMc

larryone wrote:

I thought the GPL protected against this??

Well, what I was thinking of (although I see how it can be interpreted otherwise) was that if your product becomes Open Source you're no longer the only show in town - anyone can start selling services to install/maintain product X, not just the original author.

bpmurray

aidan_walsh wrote:

Eclipse is funded and maintained largely by IBM,

Actually, it isn't. Eclipse started from OTI, the VisualAge company, and was contributed to open source by IBM a couple of years ago. As part of the contribution, IBM actively encouraged non-IBM folk to lead the various sub-projects. While IBM is still deeply involved, Eclipse is no longer dependant on IBM, nor is eclipse.org hosted by IBM. Look at the board - it's a who's who of the non-MS computing industry. Eclipse is now a true open source project.

BTW, referring to the original question, going opensource can create a lot of kudos for yourself. There are lots of examples of this, e.g. Craig McClanahan invented Struts, and is now Sun's Studio chief architect, primarily as a result of his work on Struts. You also don't have to use GPL, since there are lots of different licences. GPL is something a lot of companies won't touch because it's a viral licence (touch it & your stuff must be GPL too!). At the other end of the spectrum is Eclipse's licence which basically says "Here it is; do what you want with it, no strings attached."

One thing to remember is that if you don't have the resources to do anything with it right now, and hope to do something in a couple of years, you have to assume that whatever cool idea you have now will be superceded by developments by then. Put it on SourceForge, and publicise it: if it's good, it'll take off.

robfitz

This talk The Open Source Legal Landscape, by Brendan Scott looks like a good read on the subject.

watty

It is like getting one of those anti-malarial injections that stops OTHER people getting infected from mosquioes that bite you later... i.e. Open source benefits everyone, but for a particular project not hugely the guy writing it

watty

You can develop addons / plugins for any closed source project that supports it and has a documented API.

Some closed source examples:
Act2000! Free API. Free to extend / interface
Windows: Any one can write programs for it, in some cases using free tools and published API.
Sage Line50: Pay for API. But after that you can do amazing stuff
VB, .Net, MS C++, C#, Internet Explorer etc. You can write DLLs, OCX, Active-X etc, etc.

Being able to easily write very usefull extensions, plugins or interfaces to other projects is NOTHING to do with Open vs Closed source, but to do with good tools, and properly documented APIs or interfaces.

Even the SOURCE CODE of a system is not generally much use. What is more use is the INTERFACE and how to use it. In fact it is good programming practice to assume NOTHING and regard the innards of each part as a black box.

If you want an extra feature on Interface or a change of behavour of one module of a system, then having the source and able to recompile it is important. But then you create a code split and if a different team creates a different "split" it can become impossible to get back to a single version with both sets of "new features" unified.