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

[Henry Spencer]

On Thu, 13 May 2004, Madison Kelly wrote:
> ...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.

As others have noted, there are potentially ways around this.  If the
clients are likely to want support and customizing, you can sell that.  If
the program is something that can benefit considerably from updating and
enhancement, and you're going to do that, you can sell the current version
and release the ones that are a year old.  If it's something that's useful
by itself but benefits a lot from add-ons, you can make the core free and
sell the add-ons.  (There is at least one closed-source product, Satellite
Tool Kit, where the company has found it very profitable to hand out free
CDs of the core product and concentrate sales effort on add-ons.)

Or, you can try to have your cake and eat it too, with a "dual license" 
scheme that requires only profit-making ventures to pay royalties.  There
are many variations of that.

None of this is foolproof.  Any of these approaches can be done right or
wrong.  They're all likely to reduce *immediate* revenues.

> ...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...

I think this is a false terror.  Particularly as Linux use expands, the
user community is going to get more diverse, and is going to include a
lot of people who are simply using it as an operating system and haven't
bought into the accompanying religion.  In fact, I would say this has
already happened much more than you might think, although it's not
obvious because those non-religious users often are not vocal about it.

Contributing back is good and should be encouraged, but I don't think it
is effectively mandatory even now.

Consider trying to get a commitment to a compromise:  proprietary now but
open source in (say) three years.  (Neither side is going to be entirely
happy, but that's often the sign of a good compromise.)  That gives the
struggling company some up-front return but still "does the right thing"
in the long run.  Moreover, if the company tries one of the above ideas
after the transition and continues to see revenue, that will strengthen
the case for shortening or eliminating the proprietary period next time.

                                                          Henry Spencer
                                                       henry-lqW1N6Cllo0sV2N9l4h3zg at public.gmane.org



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