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Let's say this happened, and someone in a random foreign country made a clone of my software and started selling it there. Would that really cut into my sales?

• huhtenberg 18y ago
  It has less to do with cutting into your sales, and more with jeopardizing your IP and ownership rights. If this sort of theft is left unattended, the other side may start asserting its non-existing rights and escalate the situation. It all really comes down to the risk tolerance. Opening the source establishes great deal of a goodwill towards your customers and potentially provides you with an access to free improvements and bugfixes. On other hand it opens you to the risk of needing to actively protect your IP rights, which is something that not everyone want or can do. That's not even getting into how emotionally draining these incidents can be. It requires a really thick skin and a strong ability to ignore being taken an advantage of. Again, not everyone's traits.
  • witten 18y ago
    If the source is open, then anyone who bases a product on it has to abide by the license. Are you talking about the case of someone who downloads the source, and bases a derived product on it without abiding by the license and releasing the source code? Can't illegal distribution happen with closed source software as well? Or are you saying it's more likely to happen if the source is open, and therefore more of a potential headache?
    • trapper 18y ago
      If the software is behind the companies web server they can do what they wish (at least before gpl3).
      • witten 18y ago
        That's very true, although AGPL does fix that now.
    • huhtenberg 18y ago
      > Or are you saying it's more likely to happen if the source is open, and therefore more of a potential headache? Yes. Also it makes it easier to conceal the original source of the distribution if the source code is open.
• wizlb 18y ago
  My company sells their software worldwide, so yes, it will cut into my sales. Also, I sell telephony software so I don't need any more legitimacy or recognition.
  • witten 18y ago
    So perhaps yours is a case in which open source doesn't make sense. My thesis wasn't that it always makes sense, but simply that micro-ISV developers should rationally consider whether it does in their particular business.
    • wizlb 18y ago
      Can you give an example of where it does make sense? I'll venture a guess that you probably think that it made sense for Digium to open source Asterisk. At first, it did seem to make sense since they made the telephony cards that it worked with the best. However look at them now. Sangoma, Pika, NxtVox and many other companies are making cheaper telephony cards that work just as well as Digium's do. Now what does Digium do? They start selling a closed source version of Asterisk that has more features in it than the open source one. Open source is really nice for users but not so much for long term business profits.
      • witten 18y ago
        I don't know.. Having worked with the Digium source code before, I almost would rather that they had kept it to themselves. :) Simply put, I think open source can make sense in products where the benefits (contributions/fixes, goodwill, marketing, increased customer comfort and therefore sales) outweigh any downsides (clones, etc). One reason I made the post to begin with is because I don't think there are enough examples out there. Not because they can't be successful, but because there is a culture of fear of open source. Fear that your product will be ripped off, fear that you'll lose control of its development, and so on. In many cases, those fears are unfounded. So I'm trying to develop my particular product as one example of software where open source does make sense. And I hope other small business do so as well.
      • 18y ago