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On Wednesday 19 Mar 2003 5:32 pm, Bill Wilson wrote:From bill@xxxxxxxx
We would love to make our product open source and suggested that LUG
members help us write the code for free. Unfortunately nobody was
We are a small group at DCLUG really so I think it's unlikely that you'd find
enough members with both the right skills and the requisite time available.
Perhaps opening the request to a wider audience (like SourceForge) would reap
rewards. Open Source (as I see it) utilises a large number of developers and
therefore projects need a wide audience - most people with the skills you
need would begin by looking at SourceForge.interested. If you can tell me how to recover hundreds of thousands in
development costs by giving it away I would be interested.
The costs are only there because it began and is currently a closed source
project. (The program itself cost almost nothing in terms of hardware usage,
utility costs - it's the salary payments that comprise the bulk?) You could
charge for support (like distro suppliers) but that won't recoup your
closed-source costs because support will become available free during Open
Source development. Once released under GPL, the program isn't yours anymore,
you can't control all aspects of direction or support. I'd say the best route
to Open Source is from the beginning - that way certain costs aren't incurred
in the first place. Netscape4 couldn't be made into an open source project,
work started from a new base.
Wouldn't that be feasible? I know that every project I've encountered or coded
has changed direction more than once during development, especially once the
first stable release is available. More often than not, code designed for one
purpose has to be re-aligned to take on a new aspect or feature. The base
code isn't often changed. Starting from a new base can rid the code of all
manner of workarounds and diversions - that was the original inspiration
behind Netscape6/Mozilla.
It's a brave decision and one that is likely to cause a significant lag in the
next development phase. But then once released, it'll take on a life of it's
own - you could conceivably continue providing the current version until the
open source project is more advanced.We are a commercial software house so licence fees apply but we would be
prepared to put an attractive proposition together for a reference site.Not making it Open Source then?
I'm not particularly advanced in terms of binary programming (currently much
more time is spent on scripting languages than C++) and my Bsc isn't in any
computer related field, so I may have missed the point in some areas of the
above. I'm sure others on the list will clarify!
- --
Neil Williams
=============
http://www.codehelp.co.uk
http://www.dclug.org.uk
http://www.wewantbroadband.co.uk/
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