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What would be the point of open sourcing your hard work? I'm sorry but I don't believe that you should solve by giving it away for free, how,does that benefit y
by curiousjorge 11y ago
What would be the point of open sourcing your hard work? I'm sorry but I don't believe that you should solve by giving it away for free, how,does that benefit you? I'm genuinely curious to know if any of you have gained a real business value by open sourcing.
However, I do believe in open source if the soul purpose was to open source to begin with, just as long as people aren't naively jumping on the bandwagon after failing to gain traction or sales.
Perhaps a little too black and the white thinking above but in my own experience, open sourcing your product seems to attract freeloaders, your conversion falls, someone that would have gladly paid walks, leaving money on the table.
- philtar 11y agoSome people aren't in it for the money. And even those who are, there's plenty of successful consultancies based around open source software.
- readme 11y agoYour comment is literally irrelevant to OP's question.
- tocs 11y agoA company providing a service might turn to open source a software project if they do not want to turn into a software company. If I understand correctly MySQL AB was a company that developed an open source DB but made money selling support and training (and also sold a non open version of MySQL). The company later sold for $1 billion, so there must have been some benefit.
- curiousjorge 11y agoInteresting, is it fair to say that for enterprise customers, the bulk of the cost comes in the form of support & training? I've seen a CRM company that sold their software for 100k/year but the actual software license is only like 20% or less and the remaining 80% was training and support. So in this case letting go the license fee in return for marketing to adopters who now will turn to you for help.