5 ms·

Ask YC: Money, power, freedom, and open source.

• Hexstream 19y ago
  I think a good rule of thumb would be: If it's at the core of your business, default is not to open-source. If it's tangential to your business, default is to open-source. For example, while doing my first big web project, I'm making a pretty good (I think) web framework. I'm thinking of open-sourcing part of it at some point. But the specific project I'm working on, that will be completely closed-source.
  • bootload 19y ago
    "... If it's at the core of your business, default is not to open-source. If it's tangential to your business, default is to open-source. ..." I would have thought it's the other way around. Lots of code is just that, code. It doesn't make money by itself. You could try to sell it as is. But I'm not sure if you could make a living off it. On the other hand if you give it away [0] and let users own it something interesting happens. Firstly most users have trouble using it. Some others want additions but don't have the skill to do it. Or simply no time. Then there are others who rely on this software 24/7 but realise that division of labour means it's cheaper to get someone else to run and maintain the software. The software I'm thinking about in particular is WordPress.[1] The software is free to use but most will probably pay a small fee to have their blogs hosted with domain names and other extras. The company automattic hacks on WordPress and various other projects building a business around the software they gave away for free. [2] So how did WordPress start? How could it afford to give away it's business core at that time? Users flocked to WordPress after deserting Movable Type looking for fairer alternative. [3] The groundswell of users gave WordPress the opportunity to create a business. I don't think the software is the core business. Converting ideas into software is the core business. Giving away the "object code" of their ideas, allowed automattic to grow. [4] [0] What license can make a lot of difference. I've heard of a lot of developers releasing software only to be screwed over by companies not abiding by rules of the license. I'm thinking about busybox - http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:-utA38iMHlYJ:perens.com/Articles/StandTogether.html+gpl+software+abuse+by+companies http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:-utA38iMHlYJ:perens.com... - http://gpl-violations.org/faq/violation-faq.html http://gpl-violations.org/faq/violation-faq.html [1] http://wordpress.com/about/ http://wordpress.com/about/ [2] http://automattic.com/about/ http://automattic.com/about/ [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordpress#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordpress#History
• __ 19y ago
  Possible benefits from starting an open source project include name recognition, social status in the hacker tribe, a portfolio to show prospective employers, meeting other hackers, more competition for software companies, and the moral benefits of giving away useful tools to others. If you're not committed to it and don't want the trouble of managing a mailing list and dealing with feature requests, you can still open-source it and wait for someone else fork it. Keeping your software secret is good for practice and competitive advantage. It's a good strategy if you don't need much help from others and you're working on something difficult and non-obvious that could be useful in a future startup. But good problems like this are rare, so I suspect open-sourcing is the better choice for most projects.
• SwellJoe 19y ago
  Virtualmin is my second Open Source based business, and I'm pretty enthusiastic about Open Source in business. But the fact is that it's more about you than about open source or proprietary software, and nobody can figure out where you stand on this stuff but you. I'll tell you some of the negatives first: Open Source users are bitchy. All the time. They (or, I guess I should say, "we", as I was an Open Source user and developer before starting a business based on it), paradoxically perhaps, feel entitled far more than users of proprietary software. I suppose it is the long history of abuse in the proprietary world that has trained their software users to never expect help from their vendor, unless they pay a lot for it. Users of Open Source software expect bugfixes and answers immediately, if not sooner. They are simply far more demanding, and it's much harder to weed out your toxic "customers", since you can't stop selling to them. Since I'm a believer in weeding out your most painful customers, this is a big problem, in my opinion. You must have longer range plans with an Open Source based business. The pool of potential acquirers seems to be smaller, as even after the success of several well-known Open Source based businesses, it is still considered riskier than proprietary software. So, plan for a long haul and prepare to be able to show a HUGE userbase if you ever do want to get acquired or raise money...but the next few items make this easier. And now a positive or two or three: Open Source is easier to "sell", so growing your userbase is remarkably easier than with proprietary software. It takes free to the next level and it's not at all uncommon to see an Open Source project with millions of users within a couple of years of starting. Webmin, our Open Source core, is downloaded over 2 million times per year, just from SourceForge. That's a really nice pool of potential customers, and the kind of numbers that make investors and acquirers swoon. Getting your users to talk about you is easier. Open Source is inclusive, and a big pre-requisite for encouraging evangelism from your users is for them to have some ownership in it. Nothing makes a user feel more involved than submitting a patch, contributing to the documentation, answering questions, etc. Some of these things are possible with any software, of course, and many companies manage to create a feeling of ownership without being open...but it's easier with Open Source. Open Source users are far more likely to be fanatics about your software, and far less likely to be critical of its flaws (to outsiders, but see the first point for how they behave within the community...it's a two-sided thing). Balancing the business needs of a company and the needs of an Open Source community can also be challenging, and in ways that you probably don't anticipate if you haven't been involved in Open Source development on a few projects. Pretty much my whole development career I've been drawn to OSS projects and development...so I don't really know any other way to do things. But it does have its drawbacks. I wrote an article about this very subject a while back on the Webmin blog, which might be worth reading: http://inthebox.webmin.com/open-source-and-business-a-precarious-partnership http://inthebox.webmin.com/open-source-and-business-a-precar... I'm sure I've also posted a number of times on the subject here at news.yc. With about ten years of making my living off of Open Source software, I'm guessing I could be called a resident expert on the topic.
• pistoriusp 19y ago
  I wouldn't care much about money either if my parents paid for everything ;) Release it. If it's really amazing then you'll make a name for yourself. And then if you want to move on to the "next big thing" then you should have a bunch of people that are willing to invest in your ideas.