http://www.linuxworld.com/story/46131.htm
ab4
I have noticed a number of fellow bloggers commenting on the above article and felt that I would weigh in with my own opinion (for what its worth).
For my personal developer life, I am a strong supporter of the Open Source movement. If it had not been for the open source software InfoCentral, I don't know that I would be working as a programmer today. As for my current project, GroupOrg, I hope to see an income from consulting and hosting. I hope to offer consulting to organizations who wish to install and run GroupOrg. My fellow admin hopes to create an income from hosting GroupOrg for organizations to use. While this model does not work for all organizations, it does for ours.
As to my professional life, we take advantage of a number of open source projects. We program in Python, our development environment is xemacs, we run webware, linux, and a number of other open source projects. My job is to take insurance applications and make them available electronically. While the code we developed is closed source, I personally wouldn't see a problem with making it open source. What we offer is a benefit. The software is just a means to offer that benefit to the end user.
I have joked with one of my co-workers that I am glad that I am glad we do not open source our software because my code was pretty ugly and I didn't want others to take a look. In truth, most of our programs are developed by individuals and the communication occurs when the programs need to interact. However, we have recently begun to work together in the development process. Just moving from one programmer to three has improved the overall quality of the code. When you make your code available to the world you expand that by an even greater factor.
However, I don't know that all code should be open sourced. In the case of the software I develop at work, I don't know that there would be any benefit to releasing the code. I don't know that anyone would want to mess with our code. And then there's that darn competition thing. What would keep our competition from taking our software and tweaking it to render their product rather than ours. Personally, I wouldn't have a problem with that (imitation is the greatest form of flattery!); however, I think management would see it a different way.
However, I do hope to encourage my company to give back to the open source community. We have made changes to webware, for example. Why couldn't we return some of that code back to the community to help in the development of a package we use?
So how does a company make money off open source? By not relying on the source to be the key to revenue. Let it be services built around that code, such as hosting, consulting, or benefits.
d36
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