4 ms·
> Open source is great, because potential customers will get a chance to try out your work without spending a dime or ever talking to you. This boosts your cred
by acidburnNSA 9y ago
> Open source is great, because potential customers will get a chance to try out your work without spending a dime or ever talking to you. This boosts your credibility. On the flip side, if you give away too much, you are basically competing against yourself when you attempt to monetize your work as a product.
> Your open source release should be a demo of the product, and no more. Give things away with the goal of eventually converting the users of the free software into paying customers.
Eh, I get it, but I also kind of dislike when people use open source solely as an advertisement. Either open source something useful or don't bother open sourcing it at all. A lot of smaller open source work I've seen is done by people who put a lot of work into making a cool tool who then want to share it with other people that may find it useful and use it for new and interesting purposes.
- tmccrmck 9y agoUnfortunately, this is where we are in 2017. For many companies and people, contributing to open source has nothing to do with the Stallman concept of "freedom" - it has everything to do with PR.
- ike_yeah 9y agoGive me a non-utopian incentive where widespread open source (when you can hire professionals for security) is practical.
- ci5er 9y agoWhat about a license that says: "If you buy some X number of seats of our software, then you get a copy of the source-code to modify and do with as you will (today as well as when we, the vendor, die, as vendors are wont to do), but this does not grant a license to more seats (unless we, the vendor, are dead), nor the right to redistribute the source-code. N.B. We do not support your changes. Unless you pay us a goodly sum in advance. And even then, we really can't put SLAs behind outcomes." ??