Open Source . . . Or Not?

I’m a big supporter of open source software. I think open source and the communities clustered around it provide a unique and irreplacable resource for everyone even marginally involved in technology. Given how fast the world changes, this evaluates to a very big number with the potential to get even bigger. Participating on projects has been personally rewarding for me, too. I’ve met interesting people, had many interesting conversations, and on the whole learned quite a bit.

Since I’m a big booster of open source I’ve been struggling with how to handle licensing Daisy. I understand the benefits of open source and support the movement wholeheartedly. I use a lot of Apache-licensed code at my day job and frankly don’t know how we’d deliver our product without it. So I’m motivated to release Daisy under some sort of reasonably open license. I want to give back to the community and be a part of it. Writing proprietary code at my day job leaves me little precious time to satisfy this particular monkey on my back.

But.

I also have a dream of founding and running my own software business. My dream is to have company like Ranchero, UserLand, or Evological. I want to make cool tools people want to use. I want to interact with users of my software. I can’t do that working in $NAMELESS_CORP. I’m concerned about how open sourcing any product’s code could impact a small software shop’s bottom line. I agree with James Robertson’s views. Open source benefits the large corporations who can use their economies of scale and large cash reserves to make the open source model work for them.

I have a very hard time seeing how a small company can be economically viable when they open source their products. Red Hat turns a profit but just barely. They are fending off new competitors who can take Red Hat Enterprise distro, repackage it, and re-sell it for an order of magnitude less than what it cost RH to develop it. How can a company, especially a small one, compete with that? There are enlightened companies, like Nokia and Novell, who seem to be good stewards and actually give back in meaningful ways to the open source community. But, again, both companies are relatively large.

It seems that open sourcing products puts companies at the mercy of their customers’ good nature. While I’d like to believe that most people have good motivations/intentions, I only have to read blog posts like this to know that its not the case. I’m going to continue to think about this but, for now, Daisy will remain proprietary.