[wizlb]

"In other words, if you decide to make your end-user software open source, most of your users probably won't even notice!"

So, why do it then? The two points made by this article don't really motivate me.

1) "Selling closed source software is roughly analogous to selling someone a car with the hood welded shut."

First of all, we are not selling cars. Software is sold more like an HDTV, dvd player, mp3 player, etc. How many of those products really make it easy for you to fix it yourself? The answer is: It doesn't matter. These are throw away products. If it stops working for you, buy a new piece of software or an upgrade.

Don't give away your product just to please a couple of gear-head customers that can code.

2) "Your source code,...is very likely completely uninteresting to almost everyone else."

This is such a bullshit statement. The fact is that while my source code may not be that special, it's ALREADY DONE. If I don't open source it then potential competitors have to spend the time to get to where I am at.

[witten]

1. It's a rough analogy as I said, and honestly I don't think either the car analogy or the consumer electronic analogy is a good one. Most software is not a commodity, and unlike a DVD player, if it breaks you don't just go out and get a new one. At the very least you fix it so you can figure out how to get your data out of it. And of course, software isn't exactly a physical thing, either, so both analogies break down even further.

2. Any legal competitor who uses your source code will have to abide by the exact same open source license (unless it's BSD), meaning that you can incorporate any improvements they make directly into your original product.

[wizlb]

1. I agree that both analogies break down. However, my point stands: Just because a consumer can't fix a product themselves doesn't make the product inherently evil or bad or anything like that.

2. Okay, but that doesn't really address my point. If you don't open source the software in the first place then there are less potential competitors and therefore more potential money for your business.

Look at how well Salesforce does against SugarCRM. Which one do _you_ want to be?

[witten]

1. All morality aside, you can decide to open source or not based on simple cost-benefit analysis. Will your customers be more likely to make the purchase if the source is available? Will you get more contributions and goodwill if the source is available? If the answer to both questions is definitely no, then I think you have your answer for your particular product.

2. I don't think it's as simple as saying there are fewer competitors if your product is closed source, and therefore more money for you. If all your competitors base their product off of yours, then you have a strong case to make (to your prospective customers) that you are the market leader and everyone else is just a wannabe follower.

And even with more competitors, that doesn't necessarily mean you're losing out on sales. Competitors can also expand markets, increase awareness/legitimacy for the type of product you're selling, and as I mentioned, improve the product if it's open source.

In regards to Salesforce and SugarCRM, I'm not familiar with the product space. But I assume you're suggesting that in that particular case, Salesforce is more successful, and therefore closed source is preferable. That may be the case with those particular products, however there are a lot of factors that go into running a successful company beyond whether the source code is freely available.

[wizlb]

I agree that for a single developer, open sourcing a product can be very good. You get peer recognition and probably some job offers. But I bet those job offers come in from places that make closed source software.

For businesses, the risk associated with closed sourcing your app are finite and simple:

1) The people that want source code with their app won't buy it. As was said in the article "not that many people will even notice", so it's not a lot of people.

2) You lose out on _possibly_ getting some work done on your product for free.

It seems to me that there are more and larger risks associated with open sourcing your app:

1) Lower bar to entry for competitors. 2) Definitely losing sales to customers with IT departments that know how to compile source code. 3) Possibly losing control over your own creation. 4) Fragmentation - IMO Linux would be better and more popular if there weren't so many distributions.

[witten]

Just to look at one of your points..

> Definitely losing sales to customers with IT departments that know how to compile source code.

Quite possible, but I can say that I've gotten some of my best and most valuable feedback from these sorts of "customers". They don't pay me a cent, but they provide me with really good feature requests and bug reports.

Now you might argue that if the source was closed, I could get the feedback and the sale. Perhaps. But perhaps the savvy IT departments only install open source or freely available software.