GoingOpenSource
From Community Leadership Summit Wiki
Organizer:
Attending:
- David Boswell, Mozilla
- Cory Stousland
- Pat Patterson, OpenSSO
- Donald Smith, Eclipse
- Michael Dexter, Linux Fund
- C. Bejström, Codeswarm
- Knut Yrvin, Qt Software, Nokia
- Ryan
- Jack Repenning, CollabNet
- 3 from Oxid
What motivated you to switch from proprietary to open-source work? What considerations for and against did you consider? What surprises did you encounter? What would you have done differently.
Began with the Oxid story:
- Original motivation was "like MySQL": adoption, buzz, contributions
- Had two versions of the product just before open-sourcing: Pro and Enterprise. The open-source license covered the Pro version only. The expected sales of Pro to fall off, but this did not happen. They asked some customers why they were paying for what they could get get for free: answer, we wanted "someone's ass to kick."
- We kept some internal, some open discussions, mail lists, Skype. Response: Activity begets activity, having all discussions in public invites more public contribution.
- We wanted "extenders", but were less interested in core developers (controversial within the company)
- Made the open-source product match the Pro version, extra features of Enterprise are not in there
- Responses
- Should encourage core developers anyway: ports, translations, etc.
- Also helps hiring: history is better than a resume
- Accepting contributions to the core: maintaining ownership (so you can do dual licensing) is easier with copyright "grants" rather than "gifts"
- There is no commercial advantage to keeping part of the code proprietary, and many advantages to opening it.
- Responses
--jrep 21:05, 19 July 2009 (UTC)
