Moral dilemma?

[CWood]

Right now, I face a bit of a dilemma. Open source, or proprietary? This goes for all of my products, not just Xero MaLux, though that is included. To sell, or to give?

I know, I know, you can't make a living from OSDev, blah blah blah, but come on people, what's the harm in trying? At the end of the day, there are free web hosts, which include a free subdomain, or even go all the way and register with a builder, if HTML is undesired, put the link in forum signatures, etc. and see what happens. Cost: nothing. Profit: varies, could be very high, could be nothing. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

But at the same time, I was born and raised a programmer, by the Open Source and Hacker communities (that's hacker, not cracker, look at Eric Steven Raymond's (esr) blog, for more on this, really can't be bothered for the 500th time today to argue this). I feel I owe something back to this community. Yet, I have always wanted to own my own software company.

Open source, or not? I ask your assistance, but justify with reasons as well, so that I can weigh up, and make an informed decision. Thanks

[AJ]

Hi,

I'm not going to tell you that you should go Open Source or proprietary, but I will offer some advice, FWIW, as someone who runs a business (in a completely different sector).

If you are a decent programmer (you have the skill set) and have always wanted to own your own software company (you have the drive / ambition), then that's a pretty good combination and I would encourage you to go for it. Firstly, though, always have a business plan, which you keep up to date with a clear idea of where you want to be. I can imagine in software engineering, it's very easy to say "I know half a dozen languages, I'll set myself up as a small business and program whatever people want". If you're too sketchy about it, chances are that you'll end up taking on a load of projects and struggling to meet deadlines (if you're anything like me!). Think about how the business is going to start and where it should be in 5 years (including whether you'll need to / can afford to employ other people). Also think about how long it's going to be from the business inception, to the point at which you'll actually have a product to sell - how are you going to cope in the meantime?

If you're in the right sector of the market (one sector I can think of is Assistance Software, such as screen readers / braille output etc...), you may well be able to satisfy your conscience by giving your source code / binaries away for free, but asking people to pay for training / support. Again, I don't know how the IT industry works, but some good market research should help here.

Of course, another possibility is to join a small software business with the hope of becoming a director in the future. If you go down that route, you're pretty much going to be looking at proprietary, I guess.

Whatever route you go down, good luck!
Cheers,
Adam

[DavidCooper]

Right now, I face a bit of a dilemma. Open source, or proprietary?

The rule seems to be, if you get there first you can charge for it, but if you're doing something that's already been done you make it free (ignoring donations) and stop the person who got their first from making so much money out of the hard work they've put in. It's hard to gauge the morality of this, but it does seem wrong to me to give stuff away free rather than charging at least enough to be paid back for the work you've put in. Why should programmers be expected to work for nothing when everyone else is paid for the work they do?

It would be best if all free software had a sensible price on it which you would be expected to pay if your income is sufficiently high that you can comfortably afford to. I can't afford to give donations to everyone for using their software at the moment, but I always bookmark everything I download, fully intending to give appropriate donations to them all as soon as I can afford to.

By the way, you'll need to think carefully about your name: "death2all" probably isn't the best way to market yourself.

[JackScott]

Even if all off-the-shelf software was free (which it most certainly isn't, try finding a decent free copy of software like Quicken) there would still be a heap of work for programmers.

A lot of programmers are employed to write custom software which hasn't been written before. A plugin for Excel to juggle numbers in a business-specific way. A web portal for their sales staff. Then there's all the work that comes from customising free software. 99% of the people who use free software aren't skilled enough to modify it to their needs. That's when a programmer (or sometimes a skilled sysadmin and a healthy dose of Perl) is needed. Even in a downturn, this work still needs to be done, because getting a computer to do something (even if it means expensive setup costs for the computer) is cheaper than getting a human to do it.

If it was me, I would go down the road of open-sourcing the software, and charging for support. If you never get any support requests, it is still a good example to have in your portfolio to show prospective clients. But of course, what you do is up to you.

tl;dr: If you're a good progammer/sysadmin/consultant/whatever, there will always be work for you.

[TylerH]

Along with charging for support, you could make yourself/your company available to develop extra features (VLC does this), sell advertising on your website (Linux Mint does this), and provide options for proprietary licensing for users who don't want to comply with the OS license you choose (MySQL does this).

Those are some examples, there are more listed here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_m ... e_software.

[GAT]

Personally, I go with open source and free.
But you can sell your software under some open source licenses. Maybe that would be a suitable compromise?

[Jvac]

+1 to open source and free. There is nothing wrong with the open source market if you have something that can be used. Prime example Facebook has been developed
from the ground up using open source software .

Good luck there is many ways to make money "proprietary" is only one example.

[Rusky]

Facebook itself is not free software.

The general trend is to open source (or use open source) everything but your primary product.

[Jvac]

Facebook itself is not free software.

The general trend is to open source (or use open source) everything but your primary product.

"Facebook has been developed from the ground up using open source software"

"Developed"

@Rusky: Please be able to distinguish between the two .

Edit: Here is another one http://www.wikipedia.org/

[Brynet-Inc]

Edit: Here is another one http://www.wikipedia.org/

Wikipedia uses MediaWiki, which.. is open source.

[Solar]

I don't see a "moral dilemma". Whatever licensing you chose for your software is your choice, and your choice alone. There is no obligation whatsoever to make your software Open Source just because others did that before, or because you profitted from their choice. It was their choice, and their choice alone.

Any OS project requires serious funds if it is to become successful.

If you go Proprietary, you rely on your sales to earn those funds, and on Big Corps not sueing you out of business.

If you go Open Source, you rely on donations and sponsorships to earn those funds, on the Linux community not ripping off everything that made your OS different / better, and on Big Corps not sueing you out of business.

Your chances are slim either way, so just pick whatever feels best for you.

As for "charging for support" or similar business models in order to combine "Open Source" and "profit": That is asking for you to sponsor your Open Source product with your earnings from your support business. It's a lie, basically. (You could earn money by running a support business without spending additional time on Open Source development just as well.)

I "grew up" as a developer, not so much in the Open Source community, but in the Amiga community, where there was no bias towards Open Source or Proprietary, other than that bias your purse put on your decisions. There was PD, Freeware, Shareware(*) and commercial software coexisting peacefully, with none of the "moral" / "ethic" discussions going on that are so commonplace today. The only bias in that community was towards excellence: A software being unintuitive, or looking shoddy, was flamed to hell and back, and people raced to provide better solutions. That is the only obligation I feel.

(*): Actually, the Freeware / Shareware titles of that time were among the slickest, most user-friendly apps I have ever used, because they were consistent and polished, because their maintainers took pride in the code they owned and felt responsible for.

[Love4Boobies]

+1 to what Solar said.

[CWood]

So, after careful consideration, I've decided to go with something a little more 'unique': release as proprietary, but release the demo/lite version of my software, as OS software. The benefits to that are: I make a profit, and get my beloved business I have always wanted, AND I get the ideas, and community spirit and help that open source projects get to enjoy! Plus, releasing as OS, I encourage people to convert!

Let me know what you think, and feel free to slate it, I'm all for constructive criticism.

Cheers,
Connor

[gravaera]

Yo:

Pro tip: you can sell open source software \o/

Additionally people seem to think that licensing can only be done once, or that you can only use one license with your software: copyright is the right you have, as the author of a work to decide how you wish for your work to be distributed. As the copyright holder, you then have the authority to "license" your work to different parties, possibly in different ways for different parties.

For example, I may choose to license my software to private/individual users under a GPL license, but for corporate "users" I may license the software differently using a proprietary license.

An example of how you may use a scheme like this is say, to distribute the software as GPL to end users; but say, if your kernel becomes popular, you may want to extract some money from the large companies which may be using it; specifically for example, if it ever comes to this point, you may want to charge a small royalty off every copy that is shipped/bundled with a newly manufactured PC or other hardware setup -- so you create a proprietary sub-license for hardware manufacturers. As the copyright holder this is your right: the right to license your work as you see fit to various parties.

So there's no real dilemma: what you need to decide is exactly where the borders that limit your entrepreneurship are, and make a choice that fits your needs. Proprietary vs. open source, it's up to you, and good luck with wherever you're swayed to go

--Peace out
gravaera

[bluemoon]

I've decided to go with something a little more 'unique': release as proprietary, but release the demo/lite version of my software

This is how projects like QTSS vs Darwin Streaming Server work.
The functionality part is contributed by community, and the paid version adds business support, O&M, productization and polishing things.

This works well, since most community do not interested in polishing...