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The answer depends somewhat on the license. However, for the purpose of my answer I shall assume a product or service for which releasing the source code would

The answer depends somewhat on the license. However, for the purpose of my answer I shall assume a product or service for which releasing the source code would destroy an ability to generate a return on investment. (Of course this isn't always true, however I suspect it's not always false, either). If the only way to develop your product or service is to generate a return on investment, and society will benefit as a result of the provision of said product/service. I think in many cases it's safe to say that society has benefitted if you generate a return on your investment. Having said this, in principle I would advocate for an enthusiastic open-sourcing strategy once the societal benefit has been realised. Practically, it's a bit more complicated than that. For example: are you able to continue to generate a greater societal benefit by maintaining a monopoly on your source code? (Tough to answer, I'm sure).

btown 11y ago
If your industry is run by unethical people who would use your code, if developed in the open, in a way that would put your firm out of business and create orders-of-magnitude-fewer jobs than your firm would IF it kept that code proprietary and used it as a way to leapfrog the status quo... then I think you have a very good argument for your company keeping its core code under wraps. And even once you're at the scale where you can compete head-to-head with those people, you still might want to keep things proprietary so that you can encourage ethical and aligned behavior across the industry. Because the stakes are much higher than falling asleep happy because you maintained the "purity" of the open-source-software movement. You'd still share your changes to zlib and other non-core components, though. Because of articles exactly like this. But none of the secret sauce. As a side note, it is not at all my intent to imply that any of this refers to the finance industry. Not at all. Nope. (But if this piques your interest, send me a message at the email in my profile.)
- s73v3r 11y ago
  "If your industry is run by unethical people who would use your code, if developed in the open, in a way that would put your firm out of business" Which is entirely the case in software.

btown 11y ago

If your industry is run by unethical people who would use your code, if developed in the open, in a way that would put your firm out of business and create orders-of-magnitude-fewer jobs than your firm would IF it kept that code proprietary and used it as a way to leapfrog the status quo... then I think you have a very good argument for your company keeping its core code under wraps. And even once you're at the scale where you can compete head-to-head with those people, you still might want to keep things proprietary so that you can encourage ethical and aligned behavior across the industry. Because the stakes are much higher than falling asleep happy because you maintained the "purity" of the open-source-software movement. You'd still share your changes to zlib and other non-core components, though. Because of articles exactly like this. But none of the secret sauce. As a side note, it is not at all my intent to imply that any of this refers to the finance industry. Not at all. Nope. (But if this piques your interest, send me a message at the email in my profile.)

s73v3r 11y ago
"If your industry is run by unethical people who would use your code, if developed in the open, in a way that would put your firm out of business" Which is entirely the case in software.