Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

If you can't buy elsewhere, and don't care about keeping the software internal as your unique selling point, arguably the right thing to do is to open source it. That way you make sure it stays around, and attract third parties to support it. But there's also a lot of internal software around that wouldn't yield any benefit from either spinning off a profit-seeking business to commercialize it, or open sourcing.



The right thing to do is whatever makes the most of your investment. Don't give it away - charge for it.


> The right thing to do is whatever makes the most of your investment.

Right. And if there are no alternatives on the market already, that tells you that charging for it is not going to be viable. The way to make the most of that investment is to keep it alive, even if this means giving stuff away!


Releasing things usually comes with overhead - you have to verify that everything you're releasing doesn't have anything proprietary, that all other code is following a license that allows for release, etc.

Or you could spend $0 and let the bits just rot if they're not in use - no lawyers reviewing licenses, no code reviews, nothing. Or you could send it through engineering to make sure there's no secret sauce, then through corporate legal (at $250/hour), then through business development...

It's almost always better to just smother the code with a pillow than it is to give it away, because giving it away actually costs money, and will bring you no profit. Screw that, if it's important enough, let someone else spend the time and money writing it.


> ...It's almost always better to just smother the code with a pillow than it is to give it away

Sure, but the underlying play is that clearing the code for release will at least allow you to share support costs with other actors in the same or closely-related industries. In many ways, it's a marginal choice that sits awkwardly inbetween "smother it with a pillow" and "make it a full-blown proprietary product that can actually bring sizeable revenue". That doesn't mean it cannot work in some cases.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: