Proprietary Projects That Benefitted From Becoming Open?

redmoss asks: "The company I work for has a server-based system that we use for a wide variety of tasks: checking in customers, maintaining customer information, etc. We have had the programmer of this system working with us many years to bring it to its current level. I have approached him about open-sourcing/GPL'ing his system; he agrees with the idea in principle, but is not convinced that it would benefit him. He asked me to provide examples where opening a proprietary system has benefitted the programmer/owner. Perhaps some of you know of such cases and can point me to examples?" It should be noted that benefits from moving a project into the open may not be measured entirely in monetary units. Sometimes increased reliability of a service is worth more than an extra $1000 in sales at the end of the quarter. So can anyone out there name projects that have benefitted by opening up their source?

Sure...

[StandardDeviant]

UNIX

Seems like a crummy answer, I know. But compare the feature set of the early UNIX (1970's) with the stuff UNIX gained from the academic community after AT&T started making it available to them, especially the fruit born (no pun intended ;-) ) from the BSD open source implementation (IIRC didn't tcp/ip on unix first become available in BSD?).

Technically UNIX wasn't a product until the early 80's but it was still pretty solidly in the closed-source arena, AT&T being who they were.

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Netscape!

[Wakko Warner]

Why, just LOOK at how stable it's become since it went open so-

Bus Error

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* CmdrTaco is an idiot.

Re:Netscape!

[CentrX]

Netscape is actually not really open-source. What's open-source is Mozilla, which wasn't just magically opened from Netscape.

It very well depends on the stage of the product

[bonzoesc]

If the product is in an early stages of development, but still has enough features and codebase already present, it will benefit from Open Source. Linux was in the early stage of development when Linus released it for comments and additions, and look now.

On the other hand, if it is already at the end of it's functional lifetime, like StarOffice, releasing it publicly will probably result in its' cannibalization (sp?) and it will not evolve as quickly as competing products.

For the most part, if the product has few competitors, especially open-source competitors, it will do well as Open Souce. If a better Open Source app is already available, your product will not change much by Open-Sourcing it, unless it's far better than the alternative.

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