Ask Slashdot: Open Vs. Closed-Source For a Start-Up 325
atamagabakkaomae writes "Together with a friend, I am starting up a company in Japan that develops sensors used in motion capture. For these sensors we develop hardware and software. Part of the software development is an open-source toolkit called openMAT. We have some special purpose algorithms that we developed ourselves and that are better than our competitor's technology. I first wanted to publish everything open-source to spark interest in our company and to do development in collaboration with the community. My company partner disagreed and said that we will lose our technological advantage if we open-source it. So I eventually published only a part of the toolkit open-source and closed the most interesting code. How do you guys think that open-sourcing your code-base affects a company's business? Is it wrong for a small company to give away precious intellectual property like that or will it on the contrary help the development of the company?"
Re:Open source is good... (Score:5, Informative)
Yup, I quickly shut down a move to open source within our company that gave away some of the crown jewels. Within a product we used a open source library (GPL) that we would have to improve radically to be of any business value. I'm all for open source, and I will give some open source improvements back (crypto, bouncy castle) soon. But I won't help create an open source product that will harm my Christmas bonus, or even my chances of employment.
In other words, it makes *lots* of sense to use and maintain, and even create new open source within companies (mine does too little of that). As long as that software is what makes your business worthwhile. This is of course speaking in general. If you are big enough, you can make your money around the main, open sourced product. Generally, that won't be the case for a startup (unless it is build around something that has been open sourced by someone else).
Re:No need to help your competitors (Score:5, Informative)
I can't think of a single industry where you'd gain useful 'street cred' by releasing your code as open source.
Re:Open Source (Almost) Everything (Score:4, Informative)
Re:No need to help your competitors (Score:4, Informative)
How far would Google have progressed if they had open sourced their search engine ten minutes after they had it working?
That's a silly question.
A code base is not some static artifact. It's a living and evolving part of a larger system. It can not be replicated, just by taking the code. It needs the people behind the code too at the very least.
And by the way, Google did publish their secret sauce in an academic research paper, not that this helped their competitors much.
Or if your code isn't a product (Score:5, Informative)
I'm releasing tools from my work that I developed for our operations.
We don't want to sell the tools - for the kind of money we could get for them in a market full of existing commercial options, it wouldn't be worth the trouble, let alone the sales and support overheads.
We could keep them closed in-house. There's nothing wrong with that and it's a viable option, but it means we give up the chance of sharing maintenance costs with others and benefiting from others' improvements to the tools.
Consequently, we've decided to open them up. This will permit competitors to use them - but most of our local competitors have already licensed expensive commercial equivalents they're committed to, so the only way they're likely to benefit is if we push pricing down across the industry, which isn't likely at this stage given that our tools are significantly less polished and more limited than the existing commercial offerings. It'd also permit new start-ups who wanted to compete with us to use them - but we're the dominant player in a mature and saturated local market with significant community loyalty. Startups have consistently failed despite having vast amounts of cash pumped into them by outfits who want to knock us out of the way and don't mind taking epic short-term losses to do it.
The upside of opening our tools up is that we're hoping to see participation from other companies and non-commercial publications, reducing the cost of ownership of our in-house tools, making them easier to maintain and less dependent on just one person in one company. That should help future-proof them for us if they're successful, and hopefully get us the use of contributed enhancements we wouldn't have developed ourselves.
IMO this is one area where OSS is really key in commercial use: when you need to build tools that help your business but aren't viable as a product.
Re:No need to help your competitors (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Open Source (Almost) Everything (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not sure if this is on-topic or not, but this one of the reasons why the BSD license is better than the GPL. It allows you to open source everything except the code with the business value. The GPL forces you to open source everything.
Wrong. The GPL doesn't force the copyright owner to do anything, it only give obligations (and rights) to people accepting the license.
They could BSD or GPL the non-business value code, and still release the whole under whatever license they choose (including proprietary).
Alternatively, they could relase the business value code under the GPL, which might solve their dilema. This would attract attention and allow community contributions, but proprietary competitor could not legally use it in their produce. This is where the GPL shines.