My fiscal responcibility to my company ver. Open Source - advice please

[Madison Kelly]

Hi all,

   I am in the middle of my biggest dilema since starting to work in the 
Linux community professionally. I need your guys' advice on how I should 
go about this.

   I have been asked to write a program which I think, when done, will 
have an honest benefit to the community. Now, I was able to write it 
because my boss paid my hourly wage to write it so the program belongs 
to the company. The question is how to release it.

   Obviously my boss has made a decent investment in developing the 
program and wants to see a return (hell, the company needs money to 
survive, economics 101) and so they want to release the program closed 
source. The other issue is that this will be one thing we can offer our 
clients that no one else can offer. They worry (fairly) that if the 
program is made freely available under the GPL that we would lose our 
advantage.

   I understand their economic concerns and they are valid (this is 
certainly -not- a case of greed, we're a new startup and it's about 
keeping the company afloat). My worry though is that we are 
Linux-centric and if we don't contribute back to the community that we 
are based on we will be seen as trying to ride the wave of the new open 
source model while holding onto the old proprietary business model and 
lose respect amoung our clients. From what I can tell anyone who uses 
Linux has a political view on it.

   So, I have been arguing strongly to release to program open source. 
The boss and marketting guy wants to release it closed so that we can 
recoupe the investment they made and feed the company. Am I 
misunderstanding the Linux community? I don't want to go into the debate 
and push full out for an open source release if it hurts the company I 
work for but I also want to give back to the community that has helped 
me so often.

   On the legal side: our program calls GPL'ed programs but the actual 
program is cleanly our code.

   What have you guys done? Have you release open-sourced programs and 
still made a profit? How do most business customers react when they know 
that they -could- get the program for free? Do they still buy it from 
you anyway to ensure proper support? Do you lose work to others who took 
your app and sold it? All your advice is greatly appreciated!

Madison

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