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?"

Comments

Re:I only have one question

[LWATCDR]

Vertical Markets are small niche markets. Some exmaples would be.
Storage Building managment.
Doctors Office managment.
Video Store.
Auto shops.
Software for these are called Vertical Applications.
Guess what you can make some very good money in Vertical markets. You will never be a Lotus or MicroSoft but you can make good money.
Horizontals are things like Paint programs, or Spreadsheets. Things that almost everyone can use.

Re:I only have one question

[stienman]

For the Google Disabled:

A vertical market is a particular industry or group of enterprises in which similar products or services are developed and marketed using similar methods (and to whom goods and services can be sold). Broad examples of vertical markets are: insurance, real estate, banking, heavy manufacturing, retail, transportation, hospitals, and government.

Vertical market software is software aimed at a particular vertical market and can be contrasted with horizontal market software (such as word processors and spreadsheet programs) which can be used in a cross-section of industries.

Taken from here.

I personally like the "Broad example of a vertical market" phrase...

-Adam

Re:Use of components

[Mr. Slippery]

You should avoid the GPL if you want to reuse components (libraries for instance) in further commercial products. BSD license is better suited for this.

You're confusing "commercial" (selling it) with "proprietary" (keeping the source secret).

Putting that aside for the moment, why do you believe this to be true?

If I create a library that I wish to use in both open source and in proprietary products, GPLing it does not prevent me from putting it in my proprietary product - as copyright holder, I can do what I want. GPLing would prevent someone else from an "embrace and extend" attack, which BSD style licenses don't protect against.

If I want others to be able to link my library into their own proprietary apps, I can LGPL it.

GPL or LGPL doesn't prevent me from reusing my own code in a proprietary fashion - it prevents others from doing so. It would seem to be entirely to my benefit to use (L)GPL over BSD in such a case.