

Open Sourcing May Be Worth the Risk - mcgin
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/10/open_sourcing_may_be_worth.html

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kylemaxwell
Certainly there are business models where making the source available doesn't
really impact your business negatively. For example, my team makes a lot
(almost all, really) of the tools we develop for analyzing security
intelligence available as open source, because we compete on the intelligence
(data), not the tools themselves.

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symlinkr
Open source is interesting, it is a philosophy. I first noticed this when I
saw the backlash that was directed at Makerbot when they went against the
reprap community and decided not to open source parts of their new replicator
2 printer. When you mess with someones philosophy you have to be very careful.

The decision to open source is not something you can ever backpedal on without
serious backlash.

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theevocater
Is this something really unique to tech? I see articles golf clapping efforts
like this all the time and I wonder. This really isn't that different than
printers or razors. If you are selling a service, give the 'product' away for
as cheap as possible and upsell the service. The people who set up their own
versions of your service were likely never going to be your customers anyway.

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jimbokun
I didn't see any discussion of new revenues or profits stemming from their
decision to open source their code.

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ig0rskee
Great question, there is going to be a follow up on the results - we just need
a couple more months for a better sample.

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vineet
HBR typically has great articles, but this seems horrible.

Their primary reason for open-sourcing was quality? I am not arguing that
open-sourcing can help improve quality of a code base, but if you have quality
problems and need it, you should hire better developers.

Quite frankly, for most things that you need for your codebase, even if you
open source, you need to do the thing that you need yourself. Fine, there are
exceptions - if you work with open source you can likely get a bigger
community, potentially build partners, and do more things - but you can't open
source expecting the quality to go up.

