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At the moment, no examples of start ups which started as closed source and went open, come to my mind. However, there are a few open source startups out there
by sebst 12y ago
At the moment, no examples of start ups which started as closed source and went open, come to my mind.
However, there are a few open source startups out there which started open from the beginning, such as Drupal or WordPress. You could also have a look at NewsBlur which got some traction after Google shut down Reader.
Whether or not being successful depends on a few things:
First, will open sourcing really make the product better? From my experience people tend to overestimate the capabilities of the open source community. This community does not translate to "legion of free developers at your disposal" but require an proactive engagement and community management. Are you well prepared for that?
Second, the nature of the product and the audience: If you're selling server software, for example, such like RedHat, there will be those "private" and "small" users which take your product and use it on their own. But there are also corporate users who will buy SLAs and first and foremost want someone to blame for things that are not working. Second, there are products who benefit from centralization. NewsBlur for example may less valuable for individuals if it would not provide a "hosted service". The same goes for Facebook. Their asset is more the user base than the technology (even if that's, of course, also a huge stack).
Third, what is your "open source strategy". There are companies like Pentaho or Alfresco which offer an "open core" and sell additional features for that. I would consider that more as closed than as open source, in some way it is a bit like a "demo version".
I would love to hear what you've build so far, because open source in a commercial environment is a topic of interest for me.
- nostrademons 12y agoLiveJournal and Reddit both started as closed-source and went open, and it didn't kill the company. Both were already succeeding, though, so it's hard to tell whether open-sourcing their code actually helped them. Netscape open-sourced their code as Mozilla when they started failing. Again, it's hard to tell causality, though - did they fail because they were so distracted by open-source that they couldn't react to IE? Or did they fail because the Netscape 4.7 codebase was so bad and their resources so constrained that they couldn't react to IE? And does Firefox, born out of the open-source effort, count as a "success" because it grew out of Mozilla and finally broke Microsoft's monopoly, or a failure because it was eventually eclipsed by Chrome?
- daddykotex 12y agoIs Reddit really open sourced?
- rakoo 12y agoThe code is [0], but I don't think the data is. [0] https://github.com/reddit/reddit https://github.com/reddit/reddit
- daddykotex 12y agoWow I didn't know that, thanks
- charlesbzink 12y agoFor the most part, yes. Repository: https://github.com/reddit/reddit https://github.com/reddit/reddit
- zem 12y agoyes, except for things like spam filtering and voting ring detection, which they keep closed source to prevent gaming.
- bmm6o 12y agoI don't know about LJ, but I get the impression that Reddit released the source just out of the desire to be "good OSS citizens", and not out of any hope that it would directly benefit the company. I would be surprised if they thought it had a measurable positive impact.