Re: Open-sourcing help
Originally Posted by
DPic
I talked to
one company who said they would like to open up their source code but it would just be too much work and they don't make enough money and most of the money they do make comes off of their software. They are unable to change their business model around to make money off of their
services instead of their
software and also a lot of their software uses proprietary elements that they would have to change.
I'm not really sure I understand what they are selling. There may not be a good reason for them to switch.
Two of the big reasons why a company would open up their source code are:
1- A significant improvement of the code. This is contingent in there being a lot of people who are interested and who would find value in hacking on the code. I'm not really sure there are loads of people who would be lining up to join this project,
2- Offering your software at no cost tends to blow away your competition. Again, I don't know anything about this market, but I don't think they have a lot of competition. I think they are struggling to establish themselves at the moment...
The fact that they use a lot of proprietary components makes it a lot more difficult. When your hands are tied, your hands are tied.
If there is to be an open source competitor for this, that in itself (no licencing agreements) may prove to be a big advantage. But the code would have to come from somewhere. So it's an "if"
Otherwise, releasing your code costs next to nothing. A CVS (or other revision control) repository and a website costs a few pennies of bandwidth.
I lost a "z". Anyone seen it around here?
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