Open Source doesn't work (for your typical ISV)
Can you feel the flamethrowers warming up? :-) Larry O'Brien pointed me to this great SDTimes article "The Changing Face of Open Source". In the article, Andrew Binstock discusses the challenges in coming up to speed with a complex codebase and contributing real value as a 'volunteer'. He discusses how large projects tend to be primarily driven by commercial developers and concludes that the economics ultimately comes back to the same model as traditional closed source software.
We have released various of our internal APIs as open source in the last couple of a years and have made exactly $0 in direct revenue. There have certainly been benefits through company recognition for some of these projects (especially Thycotic.RemoteScripting which has saved several developer butts when porting a classic ASP application to ASP.NET - we have also received kind words of appreciation for Thycotic.Data at user group meetings in the past and from random individuals on the internet). Sure you say ... but what was your business model? How did you expect to make money?
It all started with the buzz of companies such as Netscape open sourcing their product and how it would take over the world (FireFox anyone?). We had just finished reading the same book that convinced Netscape to open source Mozilla and were dreaming of a growing customer base and how a new revenue stream could be added from support contracts. We learned over time that people don't pay for something when they can have it for free - and unfortunately developers only want support as long as it is free. The quickest way to reduce our support calls to zero is to point people towards our support contract order form. :-)
Looking back, was it worth open sourcing these APIs? The community recognition was wonderful but it is hard to assign a dollar value. One thing that was a great success was the number of bug reports and bug fixes we received. Developers were using the APIs and did much of our testing for us on various platforms and found/solved many problems. This seems to fall in line with Andrew's findings. However the support model did not work as a revenue stream.
Will we release future APIs as open source? Yes, if we can adapt the model to generate revenue or if bug fixes and greater stability are sufficient benefits. Time will tell.
Jonathan Cogley is the CEO and founder of thycotic, a .NET consulting company and ISV in Washington DC. thycotic has just released Thycotic Secret Server which is a secure web-based solution to both "Where is my Hotmail password?" and "Who has the password for our domain name?". Secret Server is the leader in secret management and sharing within companies and teams.