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To echo some sentiments already voiced, open sourcing a product is about more than simply publishing your source to Github. It is about building a community aro

To echo some sentiments already voiced, open sourcing a product is about more than simply publishing your source to Github. It is about building a community around that source code to evolve the product. Contributions can take many forms such as code, defect submissions, documentation, testing, etc. This community drives conference attendance, on-going media attention, and, most importantly, your company actually gaining market position from an open source strategy. Building such a community takes a fair amount of time and effort. Very few spring up like Docker. If you are committed to the long haul of building such a community then you could gain a tremendous amount. If you are expecting to simply publish the code and get immediate and long-term PR from the act of your company working in a public repository, then I think open sourcing will not only fail to meet that expectation, but likely be a critical distraction for your company.

zem 12y ago
xara is a good cautionary tale along those lines - they open sourced what from all accounts was a very nice vector graphics editor, but it languished for want of active community management from the company.
- teleclimber 12y ago
  One huge problem with Xara's "open source" move was they kept a critical element closed source: "Xara and the volunteer developer community disagreed from almost the very beginning about a crucial issue: the company's decision to keep the application's core rendering library CDraw closed source. The developers said time and time again that a half-open, half-closed application was a dealbreaker."[1] [1] http://archive09.linux.com/feature/119790 http://archive09.linux.com/feature/119790 If you do any such thing you can't expect open source to work for you.
  - zem 12y ago
    ah, missed that! for some reason i thought they'd eventually given in and opened up the CDraw code.

zem 12y ago

xara is a good cautionary tale along those lines - they open sourced what from all accounts was a very nice vector graphics editor, but it languished for want of active community management from the company.

teleclimber 12y ago
One huge problem with Xara's "open source" move was they kept a critical element closed source: "Xara and the volunteer developer community disagreed from almost the very beginning about a crucial issue: the company's decision to keep the application's core rendering library CDraw closed source. The developers said time and time again that a half-open, half-closed application was a dealbreaker."[1] [1] http://archive09.linux.com/feature/119790 http://archive09.linux.com/feature/119790 If you do any such thing you can't expect open source to work for you.
- zem 12y ago
  ah, missed that! for some reason i thought they'd eventually given in and opened up the CDraw code.