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

[cbbrowne-HInyCGIudOg at public.gmane.org]

> 
> >   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.
> >
> 
> Open source history includes both companies doing well and companies
> being burned by open source releases.
> 
> How much support does it need?  If not much, you are likely to get burned.
> 
> Can it be dual licensed?  See MySQL for a successful version of this option.

That's arguable, dually:

 1.  The people at Nusphere wouldn't agree with you; they got messed up
     pretty bad by MySQL AB;

 2.  MySQL isn't an "open source community" project; it is a 
     commercial package, implemented by a private group of developers,
     under a traditional "proprietary" license much like those used for
     other "non-open-source" software, that you can occasionally get for
     free.

 3.  Oh yes, and we don't know the long term answers here.  MySQL AB
     recently got a ~$20M chunk of vulture capital, and eliminated LGPL
     portions of their software shortly thereafter.

The company is quite clearly playing to maximize licensing fees, while
backpedalling whenever it starts turning into bad publicity.  It is not
obvious that the company will last for any extended period of time now
that they have jumped into the big league, and are a tiny fish amongst
the commercial DB vendors.
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