[wplug] GNU GPL License

[Robert Knapp]

Not sure if this helps, but I've been watching this with interest.

The company I work for had a similar discussion in 2005.  We had  
little in the way of people resources,
and wanted to leverage the open source community's contributions to  
help us meet our customer's needs.

After a LOT of discussion (where I was one of the key advocates), we  
ended up moving from being a proprietary application to open source  
(GPL'd).

Ultimately, after looking at it we found we could do the same job with  
many fewer resources, have a more secure product offering,
and leverage outside interest in our product.  So, in 2006 we released  
version 2.6  of our product at PyCon.

  In 2007, we found another group (coactivate.org) that was doing  
similar work, but on a different platform (plone instead of pure  
python), and decided to leverage their work with our own custom, but  
still open sourced package.

The release of that codebase occurred over this last summer.

So we've been "an open source company" since 2006, and have not lost  
one customer, contract or even sales lead to people taking our  
software and building their local version or starting their own  
company.  In fact, most of our customers are interested in us because  
they *could* run their own servers... but really all they want is that  
option.  (One of our competitors was interested in using our package,  
talked to us and went on their own... they are still not even in an  
alpha stage yet.)

The secret is that we market our expertise both in using our own  
tools, but also in helping scientists to collaborate internationally  
regardless of the specific tools used.  We offer a service, not  
software.

If you are looking to sell 10,000 units of Foo each month and make  
tens of millions dollars with a simple (and radical) idea the gets  
developed to point X and no further, then open or closed source is  
irrelevant.  Either way if there is a market for your idea, someone  
will come along and copy/improve upon it, and the highway of IT  
history is littered with the corpses of closed source products that  
were supplanted by copycats.

If you are looking to continuously develop an idea, learn from your  
customers and use your expertise (and software) to help them achieve  
their goals, then open source will work well for you.  Not only do you  
get to learn from what your customers want and need, but also from any  
copy cat companies that use your software to do the same.

Hope this helps, and if you have any questions fire away.


On Oct 14, 2009, at 3:42 PM, Bruno Pierri Galvao wrote:

> I am still uncertain on the whole situation. If I have all my code
> contributions open source then how can I develop a multimillion dollar
> business when anyone could take the code and set up the exact same
> business in minutes? Open source sounds nice but is it the best
> approach for my situation?
>
> Sent from my iPhone
>
> On Oct 14, 2009, at 1:54 PM, Tom Grove <tom.grove at nepinc.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> On Oct 14, 2009, at 1:03 PM, Bruno Pierri Galvao wrote:
>>
>>> Point well taken. I was using eBay as an example. The idea is to
>>> develop a business-to-business marketplace such as alibaba.com but
>>> with added functionality. We thought it was going to take us much
>>> longer because we were going to code the b2b marketplace from
>>> scratch but on Sept. 30, 2009 the first open source b2b marketplace
>>> was launched (phpb2b). We did not want to reinvent the wheel so we
>>> plan on using this open source b2b marketplace.
>>>
>>> So based on these discussions you guys think that there are no
>>> problems in keeping the add-ons open source? This software is
>>> responsible for millions of dollars of transactions between reliable
>>> businesses. Security is a must. That means, if one of the bug
>>> contributors decides to exploit a bug they found then we are in big
>>> trouble.
>>>
>>> -bruno
>>>
>>
>> There is no inherent security when using closed-source code.  Let's
>> use the iPhone as an example.  Recently Apple has fixed a security
>> hole that was used by the iPhone Dev Team to jailbreak phones.  As
>> some of you may know the iPhone has been jailbreakable for quite some
>> time, meaning that this exploit has been a problem since then.  The
>> iPhone OS is closed.
>>
>> I'm not advocating opening up the iPhone software, however, one could
>> make the argument that if it were open sourced the exploit could have
>> been patched quicker.  There more eyes that you have on code the more
>> eyes you have to pickup on mistakes.  It's similar to a continuously
>> running code review.
>>
>> As another example you can take phpb2b.  By you alone downloading and
>> coding against it the developers have another set of eyes looking at
>> their code, making it better, more efficient, and more secure.  Yes,
>> there are some people out there looking to exploit holes in your code
>> but they will be there whether or not you close your source.  The
>> problem lies with the fact that if you close your source you will  
>> have
>> no one but yourself helping to fix those exploits.
>>
>> Just something to think about.
>>
>> Tom
>>
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