

Open-source your product - palish
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=364526

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gruseom
_The product is valuable because of the thousands of small decisions you made
as you were developing the product. The source code is just the manifestation
of those decisions. In other words, the product is valuable because of its
design, not because of the source code that describes that design. Just
because someone has access to a product's source code doesn't mean they can
make valuable decisions about it._

That's the key insight of Peter Naur's classic article "Programming as Theory
Building". (That's Naur as in BNF.) He starts with the question: why is it
that code, even well-written code and even well- _documented_ code (rare as
that is) isn't sufficient to allow a new team to effectively take over
development of a system? His answer: the program is not the source code, but
rather a shared mental construct (he says "theory", you said "design") that
lives in the minds of the people who made it. Source code is a textual
representation of that construct, but it's a lossy one. So if you lose all the
original people, it's hard to reconstruct the program.

Edit: I posted the article to YC ages ago but that link is broken. You can get
it here:
[http://web.archive.org/web/20080209152318/http://www.zafar.s...](http://web.archive.org/web/20080209152318/http://www.zafar.se/bkz/Articles/NaurProgrammingTheory)

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aaronblohowiak
Fascinating! Thanks for making the connection.

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jgranby
I write a small Mac shareware program. Perhaps the suggestion isn't aimed at
me, but if I open sourced the whole thing, one person with enough knowledge
could compile it and distribute to everyone else for free. I have little doubt
that sales would be hit very hard.

Web apps might be a bit more suited to it once they have momentum and users.
If Facebook released its source code (security issues aside), it wouldn't make
a difference to them -- people join and use Facebook because all of their
friends use it, and that's got nothing to do with the source code.

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gruseom
One thing you didn't really address is what the benefits of open-sourcing your
product would be. Unless I missed something, the discussion so far has only
been about the (real or imagined) downside.

~~~
palish
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=364703>

~~~
gruseom
Thanks.

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jwilliams
I'm confused - are we meant to comment on this or the comment it links to?

Not sure why this was posted as a top level story. Make it into an Ask HN or
something at least.

~~~
palish
I posted it as a toplevel so that the idea would gain more exposure. (I
certainly don't care about karma -- it's meaningless.) I'm genuinely
interested to know what people think about the idea of open-sourcing their
product at launch. And the more people who give their opinion, the better.

Feel free to leave a comment here or in the other thread.

~~~
jwilliams
Well I'm probably just being a stick in the mud - but that seems like a bad
idea. If everyone posted comments as threads the top page would be a cluttered
mess.

~~~
palish
Only if everyone made insightful or otherwise useful comments, which the
community then upvoted. That would be a good thing, not a bad thing.

Also please consider that I spent a good deal of time on crafting my reply, in
the spirit of hopefully helping someone (and not to read myself talk). Also,
my reply was about a totally different topic than the thread it was inspired
by.

~~~
unalone
Your post definitely was worth submitting as a topic, agreed. I don't think
that it's worthwhile too often, but in this case it's thoughtful, well-
written, and interesting. Better than most blog posts I've read recently.

I had a comment of mine submitted as a post a while back, and I was very
grateful - I thought the comment was worth a post. If comments are valuable
stories, then, I don't see a problem at all with your self-submitting this
one.

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lst
Only think of this:

Our personal thinking is never 'Open Source', we always keep some more-or-less
decisive part secret (read: protected!), and this for good reasons.

To open-source everything would be very similar to showing yourself naked
everywhere...

But I agree that commonly used libraries should be open source (the ones I use
are _all_ open source).

