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Open Sourcing a Vertical Market Application?
BigCanOfTuna asks: "The company I work for is considering the possibility of turning over one of thier enterprise applications to the open source community. They are doing this for a number of reasons including raising thier profile in the OS community, developing relationships with other Energy companies that would be willing to hire us as consultants, and of course just for good will (if there is such a thing in business!). Since the application is very specific to a vertical market, can one expect to see the same results that other open source projects see? Are there any other successful OS projects out there that are geared to a specific niche?"
... are generally a bunch of hackers looking for ways to get into the computers on the corporate networks and steal money from organizations like Pentagon.
If you open source your application, your customers will think you are a tofu-eating, pot-smoking dirtie hippy and behave accordingly. When Redhat realized they weren't getting anywhere with this open source bullshit, they pulled off, and right now making lots of money.
It's also possible that while you were writing your application, you inclided some SCO code in it. You might not know it, and none of your peers might have ever worked at SCO, but SCO hires the best developers in the world, and Darl McBride can write an infinite loop that only takes 17 CPU cycles to execute, so you might endanger your customers being sued by SCO.
Also, if you open source your application, they put you on that telmarketing lists, and each day you will be getting calls from Stallman and ESR asking to donate to FSF and to Paypal.
Just my 2c.