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Real World Guide to Open Sourcing a Saturday Project
URL: Real World Guide to Open Sourcing a Saturday Project
At 10:49 AM on Oct 16, 2007, Michael Urban wrote:
Fresh Jobs for Developers Post a job opportunity
In this article , Geertjan talks about his personal experiences, his assumptions at the start, the stages the project went through, and some lessons he learned during the process. He also hopes to hear from others, whether you've gone through a similar process and if your discoveries are similar. What has your experience been with open sourcing a project?
Read the full article now .
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Re: Real World Guide to Open Sourcing a Saturday Project
What if you're sitting on something valuable that a company is willing to pay real money for?Throwing it into the open is like giving it away in the hopes someone will give you kudos.
I'm not against open source. I've given away toy projects myself. I'm also very grateful to the whole open source thing, I've benefited and learned a lot from it.
Aside from yet another super duper desktop search engine, what if you've invented or created something truly genuine and unique. Something that really sticks out, which could be a valuable asset to a bigger company that can take it to the next level and use in their businesses, give them that edge? Some companies are hungry for something competitive.
Geertjan's projects looks interesting, and seems like a prime candidate for the open source. Kudos.
Re: Real World Guide to Open Sourcing a Saturday Project
You're under the continued misunderstanding that it's software that makes the business.It's not, it's everything else that surrounds the software that makes the business.
How many folks have forked, say, JBoss and sell it as their own? No doubt it's embedded in some packaged applications, and it may not even be known to the customer that they're running JBoss -- because they're NOT running JBoss, they're running some other vertical application built upon JBoss.
And make no mistake, the JBoss architecture at the time was novel, and extensible. Much of the "power" of JBoss comes from that architecture, not just the implementations of components upon that architecture.
Are their 3rd party JBoss consultants out their supporting JBoss outside of the actual JBoss organization? Yup. Do you really think RedHat is hurting because of that competition? I don't.
Look at the "big hits" of the internet recently -- the relationship sites, etc. Do you think it was software that made those sites what they are today? Or was it the vision of the people who create those sites manifested through software. Do you really think if, say, Facebook OSS'd their platform that a competitor would pop up on that software and even make a dent?
No. It won't happen.
Consider, say, the Gimp vs Photoshop. Now, I'm not super familiar with PS and all of its power, but do you really think that they have some magic formula in terms of software that makes them better than the Gimp? I think PS does CMYK whereas Gimp doesn't, or somesuch nonsense. But there's no rocket science in the algorithms for that kind of processing, all of that code is well known -- it's just science. Gimp doesn't handle it because they have decided not to put the resources in to it.
Now, if Adobe OSS'd PS, would folks drop the Gimp in a heartbeat? Would Adobe lose money? Absolutely. But the Free Gimp doesn't really hurt PS. Because PS does the same thing, and does a better job of it in non-tangible ways (UI design mostly) plus it has a HUGE industry of trained professionals behind it carrying it forward ("I already know PS, I don't know Gimp, cheaper to buy PS than to learn Gimp, why risk it?").
There are other competing products to PS, good products, cheaper products, but -- they're not Photoshop. It's not because of some secret algorithms. It's a whole industry momentum and UI work that Adobe has done.
See, the folks making the software, OSS or not, have two keen advantages. 1) They know the software they've written, and are able to respond to changes much more quickly and efficient and, more importantly, 2) they know WHY the software was designed. What role it is made to fill. They know their expectations and use cases for that software and can talk to their potential client in THOSE terms, business terms, not software terms. Adobe, for example, gets to talk to a zillion PS customers every year on how to improve and make their product better, while the Gimp folks are saying "Do this like Photoshop!", and always catching up.
Someone just stumbling upon the software won't have those advantages. They have to catch up just to the state the software is today, while the originators keep pushing it forward, while the original authors leverage their momentum and market and make the product better.
As the market stabilizes and the software matures, that's when folks start catching up. That's when the late comers start riding the wave that the original authors started, and servicing clients in their wake.
But by then, if there is a market at all, the original authors have a large chunk of it. Yea, interlopers will encroach upon their business, and even take business from them. But most markets are big enough for more than one, and even customers like multiple vendors, so having competition, even folks selling the product YOU wrote, can actually be a GOOD thing in the long run.
Am I saying that everything should be OSS? Nope. That's really up to you. I'm just saying that for many markets, it really doesn't matter. You can make the source available and the market really won't care. I think it helps more than it hurts simply by driving adoption and making the product accessible to users.
If it's important to their business, they'll come to you for help with it. I mean, don't forget, they're using your project because they didn't want to write their own in the first place. What makes you think they'll want to maintain it?
Re: Real World Guide to Open Sourcing a Saturday Project
I mostly agree with you. You are comparing application to other existing applications. Commodities.I was focusing on technological inventions. If you invent something that is genuine, unique, and novel, you have something of value.
A lot of things that are out there don't have any inventions in them. Perhaps they have nice clean structured ways of doing things with an algorithm or two, but a genuine sizable invention, most open source projects don't have that.
I was comparing applications and inventions, I should have been more clearer.
Re: Real World Guide to Open Sourcing a Saturday Project
Well, I'll put it this way (and I work with Geertjan, so we're in similar situations). Most of the work I do is open source from the get-go.I was a contractor in the 90's. I'm very grateful that I work for a company supportive of open source for a very simple, practical (and dare I say selfish) reason - if I open source what I do, then, should I decide to return to contracting, I can reuse all of my old work. If it were locked up behind a firewall, I would not have that option.
Now, if I came up with something brilliant and revolutionary as you describe, I'm certainly going to think about it first; but most times when I've come up with something brilliant and revolutionary, it turns out to be easy to find five similar examples already out there - so I'm wary of thinking too much of my own brilliance
NetBeans.org
Evangelist/Senior Staff Engineer, Sun Microsystems
Re: Real World Guide to Open Sourcing a Saturday Project
I completely agree with you that open sourcing is great while inside a company. I've done the same. I asked my employer first, and explained that I have this thing that could give them a great head start, but in return, it'd have to remain open source status. Not all employers appreciate that, and some think that everything you do, ought to become their exclusive property, which is not smart.The "open source on the inside" thing might be worthy of a new topic. See if other people ever use the open source umbrella to prevent losing ownership...
Re: Real World Guide to Open Sourcing a Saturday Project
Nice read, thanks for posting. My 'saturday' project was a compiler and interpreter for a Basic style programming language to which I add 2d game programming functionality. It's a C project and I have the project name registered on sourceforge but not had time as of yet to to clean up the code and upload.There are few commercial game oriented Basics around: Blitzbasic and Dark Basic. My motivation was that these languages stayed too faithful to the commonly accepted 'Basic' way of doing things: ie alot of things about coding Basic suck. So I created a Basic with a couple of novel language features and I think the result was very nice. So is there a commercial oppurtunity there? I don't know, I really don't have the energy at this point to attempt to market it.
Would my employerer have found the project viable? Absolutely not. I work in finance software. I told my boss I had created a compiler and she looked at me like I was crazy.
Re: Real World Guide to Open Sourcing a Saturday Project
I read a fascinating article once, about the husband and wife couple who created DragonDictate, which took off but was partly a labor of love, got bought out by some folks who later went under, and whose IP was sold off - and they're now legally barred from working on something they spent twenty years creating. That just seems cruel and obscene.As a U.S. employee for an American company, my employer owns copyright on what I write if it's done on work time or with company equipment (like the laptop I'm using to send this message). That's the law, and so well proven it's not worth trying to fight. As long as it's open-source, I'm fine with that. If that stopped being okay, I'd reconsider my employment options. I might not own my work, but I can reuse it when I want and how I want, and that's good enough that I feel comfortable about the future.
NetBeans.org
Evangelist/Senior Staff Engineer, Sun Microsystems
Re: Real World Guide to Open Sourcing a Saturday Project
What if you're sitting on something valuable that a company is willing to pay real money for? Throwing it into the open is like giving it away in the hopes someone will give you kudos.There are many economically sound reasons for open sourcing something even if some company is willing to pay money for it.
I'm not against open source. I've given away toy projects myself.
Open source doesn't need people like you, and it's people like you who give open source software a bad name. Please keep "toy software" to yourself.
Re: Real World Guide to Open Sourcing a Saturday Project
Hi all, thanks for the varied and interesting responses. About the money aspect, well, I guess if I knew everything about the domain in question (i.e., music), and if I knew all the ins and outs of Java programming, I would be less likely to open source something (I probably still would, but the threshold would certainly be higher). However, since I am neither a music expert nor a programming expert, but relatively familiar with both, open sourcing was the ideal solution. In other words, I wasn't ever going to bring the application to a money-making level anyway , so that factor never came into it, i.e., I never was able to think: "Hmmm. One day someone is going to buy this and I'll be a millionaire." That's probably a good thing anyway, because it would probably have been a fallacy to believe that even if I did have all the required knowledge I would have been able to get the application as far as it will get now that it is open sourced. Innovation really does happen elsewhere, irrespective of the skill set, insight, or creativity one personally may have.Re: Real World Guide to Open Sourcing a Saturday Project
> What if you're sitting on something valuable that> a company is willing to pay real money for? Throwing
> it into the open is like giving it away in the hopes
> someone will give you kudos.
>
> There are many economically sound reasons for open
> sourcing something even if some company is
> willing to pay money for it.
>
such as?
Company would have paid you (say) $100.000 for it, but instead gets it for free off the web. You get nothing, and remain on the dole.
> I'm not against open source. I've given away toy
> projects myself.
>
> Open source doesn't need people like you, and it's
> people like you who give open source software a bad
> name. Please keep "toy software" to yourself.
You're the one giving OSS a bad name, with your elitist attitude.
It's people like you more than anything else that stop me from contributing to OSS projects (I used to, stopped in part because of such attitudes).
Remember that Rod Johnson's "toy software" was Spring.
And I'm pretty sure JBoss started out as someone's "toy" as well.