

Ask YC: Money, power, freedom, and open source. - JesseAldridge

I've always thought it would be cool to put my code online for others to mess with.  But every time I think about it, I end up being inhibited by the question 'What if I want to make money off of this?' or I think 'By releasing this, I'll be wasting my competitive advantage.'  Then I get all conflicted thinking big general thoughts about capitalism vs. er... anti-capitalism (socialism? idealism? whatever you call it).<p>I'm currently 23 and being supported by my parents, which is nice because it offers me freedom, but lame for obvious reasons.  What I really want is the freedom to work on my ideas and the power to make them real.  I don't care much about money and am not very interested in going the VC -&#62; IPO route, but I also realize that turning big ideas into reality may take a lot of money.  So part of this is me figuring out what trajectory to set my life on.  I guess I'll probably end up doing some combination of open / closed stuff, but I'm having trouble deciding where to draw the line.<p>I guess this is just the classic tension between open source vs. closed source playing out in my head.  Stallman vs. Gates.  I'm curious to see what YCers think of the issue.
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SwellJoe
Virtualmin is my second Open Source based business, and I'm pretty
enthusiastic about Open Source in business. But the fact is that it's more
about you than about open source or proprietary software, and nobody can
figure out where you stand on this stuff but you.

I'll tell you some of the negatives first:

Open Source users are bitchy. All the time. They (or, I guess I should say,
"we", as I was an Open Source user and developer before starting a business
based on it), paradoxically perhaps, feel entitled far more than users of
proprietary software. I suppose it is the long history of abuse in the
proprietary world that has trained their software users to never expect help
from their vendor, unless they pay a lot for it. Users of Open Source software
expect bugfixes and answers immediately, if not sooner. They are simply far
more demanding, and it's much harder to weed out your toxic "customers", since
you can't stop selling to them. Since I'm a believer in weeding out your most
painful customers, this is a big problem, in my opinion.

You must have longer range plans with an Open Source based business. The pool
of potential acquirers seems to be smaller, as even after the success of
several well-known Open Source based businesses, it is still considered
riskier than proprietary software. So, plan for a long haul and prepare to be
able to show a HUGE userbase if you ever do want to get acquired or raise
money...but the next few items make this easier.

And now a positive or two or three:

Open Source is easier to "sell", so growing your userbase is remarkably easier
than with proprietary software. It takes free to the next level and it's not
at all uncommon to see an Open Source project with millions of users within a
couple of years of starting. Webmin, our Open Source core, is downloaded over
2 million times per year, just from SourceForge. That's a really nice pool of
potential customers, and the kind of numbers that make investors and acquirers
swoon.

Getting your users to talk about you is easier. Open Source is inclusive, and
a big pre-requisite for encouraging evangelism from your users is for them to
have some ownership in it. Nothing makes a user feel more involved than
submitting a patch, contributing to the documentation, answering questions,
etc. Some of these things are possible with any software, of course, and many
companies manage to create a feeling of ownership without being open...but
it's easier with Open Source. Open Source users are far more likely to be
fanatics about your software, and far less likely to be critical of its flaws
(to outsiders, but see the first point for how they behave within the
community...it's a two-sided thing).

Balancing the business needs of a company and the needs of an Open Source
community can also be challenging, and in ways that you probably don't
anticipate if you haven't been involved in Open Source development on a few
projects. Pretty much my whole development career I've been drawn to OSS
projects and development...so I don't really know any other way to do things.
But it does have its drawbacks.

I wrote an article about this very subject a while back on the Webmin blog,
which might be worth reading:

[http://inthebox.webmin.com/open-source-and-business-a-
precar...](http://inthebox.webmin.com/open-source-and-business-a-precarious-
partnership)

I'm sure I've also posted a number of times on the subject here at news.yc.
With about ten years of making my living off of Open Source software, I'm
guessing I could be called a resident expert on the topic.

------
__
Possible benefits from starting an open source project include name
recognition, social status in the hacker tribe, a portfolio to show
prospective employers, meeting other hackers, more competition for software
companies, and the moral benefits of giving away useful tools to others.

If you're not committed to it and don't want the trouble of managing a mailing
list and dealing with feature requests, you can still open-source it and wait
for someone else fork it.

Keeping your software secret is good for practice and competitive advantage.
It's a good strategy if you don't need much help from others and you're
working on something difficult and non-obvious that could be useful in a
future startup. But good problems like this are rare, so I suspect open-
sourcing is the better choice for most projects.

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Hexstream
I think a good rule of thumb would be:

If it's at the core of your business, default is not to open-source. If it's
tangential to your business, default is to open-source.

For example, while doing my first big web project, I'm making a pretty good (I
think) web framework. I'm thinking of open-sourcing part of it at some point.
But the specific project I'm working on, that will be completely closed-
source.

~~~
bootload
_"... If it's at the core of your business, default is not to open-source. If
it's tangential to your business, default is to open-source. ..."_

I would have thought it's the other way around.

Lots of code is just that, code. It doesn't make money by itself. You could
try to sell it as is. But I'm not sure if you could make a living off it. On
the other hand if you give it away [0] and let users own it something
interesting happens. Firstly most users have trouble using it. Some others
want additions but don't have the skill to do it. Or simply no time. Then
there are others who rely on this software 24/7 but realise that division of
labour means it's cheaper to get someone else to run and maintain the
software.

The software I'm thinking about in particular is WordPress.[1] The software is
free to use but most will probably pay a small fee to have their blogs hosted
with domain names and other extras. The company automattic hacks on WordPress
and various other projects building a business around the software they gave
away for free. [2]

So how did WordPress start? How could it afford to give away it's business
core at that time? Users flocked to WordPress after deserting Movable Type
looking for fairer alternative. [3] The groundswell of users gave WordPress
the opportunity to create a business.

I don't think the software is the core business. Converting ideas into
software is the core business. Giving away the _"object code"_ of their ideas,
allowed automattic to grow. [4]

[0] What license can make a lot of difference. I've heard of a lot of
developers releasing software only to be screwed over by companies not abiding
by rules of the license. I'm thinking about busybox

\-
[http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:-utA38iMHlYJ:perens.com...](http://209.85.173.104/search?q=cache:-utA38iMHlYJ:perens.com/Articles/StandTogether.html+gpl+software+abuse+by+companies)

\- <http://gpl-violations.org/faq/violation-faq.html>

[1] <http://wordpress.com/about/>

[2] <http://automattic.com/about/>

[3] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wordpress#History>

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pistoriusp
I wouldn't care much about money either if my parents paid for everything ;)

Release it. If it's really amazing then you'll make a name for yourself. And
then if you want to move on to the "next big thing" then you should have a
bunch of people that are willing to invest in your ideas.

