

Ask HN: Business implications of open sourcing our framework? - EGreg

I&#x27;ve spent the last two years building a framework called Q, in order to enable a consistent, easy creation of social apps and everything that goes with it (realtime collaboration, mobile, addressbook integration, facebook integration, and more). I&#x27;d like to make it available to the wider internet because I believe the greatest good comes when platforms are eventually open sourced. (The web, computer languages and frameworks, etc are mostly open source.)<p>But I would like to ask about the business implications of this. My company has obtained friends+family funding of over $100k, which - together with our own bootstrapping - helped pay for this framework. We plan to make our money with the apps that we build on top of it, as well as consulting and growing the ecosystem. What are the implications of open sourcing it, and under what license?
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EGreg
If we do it, it will cost less to connect with new developers, sysadmins etc.
and we can also identify bugs, security flaws etc. much faster. I would rather
socialize the further costs and benefits of these things to everyone.

At the same time I am worried that a company with a large userbase like Google
or Facebook is just going to take it and kill our company much like what
happens in an acqui-hire. Meaning, they have the user base and ultimately
critical mass matters when it comes to user adoption. Look for example at
Diaspora*.

You can read more about our framework and its goals here:
[http://qbix.com/blog](http://qbix.com/blog) as well as here:
[http://qbixstaging.com/QF](http://qbixstaging.com/QF) (the framework portalin
development by me.)

Currently I am thinking of testing the waters by releasing Q under an AGPL
license as it's the most toxic to large, for-profit companies. My company
however wouldnt be bound by it ourselves since we wrote the code. Is that
right? It would enable other open source projects to spring up, and then
later, when we have enough of a community behind it, we might also release
under other licenses such as BSD or Apache. Maybe even work with the Apache
foundation.

The other question is who should control the copyright of the framework
legally (and issue the license). Should it be the for-profit company Qbix, or
should a non profit foundation be set up just for managing this framework and
its community?

Any advice would be appreciated - from experienced entrepreneurs, investors,
businessmen and lawyers.

