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

I predict two things:

[stienman]

Depending on just how vertical the application is, I predict the following:

1) Companies wanting to use it will have a staff member to manage it, who will likely be able to modify code as needed.

2) Assuming the program is internal to the company, it will not be distributed - therefore there is no need to share code changes back with you and the community at large.

So it's likely you will have some users, but few contributers.

But that's based on the assumption that it is of little use to more than a handful of people/companies around the world, and that it is only to be used internally to the company.

-Adam

Re:I predict two things:

[jrstewart]

2) Assuming the program is internal to the company, it will not be distributed - therefore there is no need to share code changes back with you and the community at large.

So it's likely you will have some users, but few contributers.

Legal obligation is only part of the reason to contribute to an open source program. Another huge one is not having to maintain your own set of patches against the main app. Then there's the idea of community - if you share you'll cool features hopefully other people will too. These are sound arguments that businessmen understand. They all lower your local development costs.

definition of success

[turg]

Success depends strongly on having a clear definition of success in advance. You can have 100% success if your goal is only to make the code available. You can have complete failure if you have inspecific (which usually means unrealistic) ideas about getting huge consulting contracts and massive participation in developing the code

If by "successful open source project" you mean one with an active community of contributors, I would be wary of a definition of success that depends on the unpredictable actions of as-yet-unknown strangers. In any case, developing and maintaining such a group takes work.

Since the application is very specific to a vertical market, can one expect to see the same results that other open source projects see?

Sure. In fact, the smaller the pond, the bigger the fish you can be -- but it's all relative, of course. Again, determine a reasonable definition of success. Will you feel less successful if only one other organization uses your code (in the short term)? Why or why not? Have you lost anything if no-one adopts it?

Other success factors you mention are getting consulting contracts and raising your profile. These are both possible, but not knowing your industry I won't give you advice on how to achieve them. But again, knowing in advance exactly what it is you want to achieve (and how you are going to measure whether you've achieved it -- especially WRT raising profile) is key.

An Argument for OSS.

[jfisherwa]

You make some good arguments, but you're looking at it from the wrong angle.

His product will not directly benefit other businesses. It will, however, benefit contractors that implement OSS applications within these businesses.

I'm in a similiar position. I have two decently sized applications that I developed and licensed out - there is only one client per each. I would like to see them developed more, and hope someone could use them--perhaps I may be able to make a few bucks down the road as consulting for this.

In reality, I am not really missing out on any income as the chances of someone picking this up and going after a client that I even know exists are pretty slim. I will, however, gain a better understanding of the application itself, maybe make a few acquaintances and hopefully pay back the community that has helped me in so many ways already.

Isn't that what it's all about?

Jason

Depends on the Application ...

[TheFuzzy]

That all depends on the vertical market your application is for. Ask yourself these questions:

1) Are the potential users of this application internet & computer savvy?
2) Are the consultants/vendors to this market more likely to contribute to a project, or to steal the code and never contact you?

We considered open sourcing our temp agency application -- 100% of our profit comes from customizations anyway -- but after analysis realized that temp agencies don't have the know-how to find and install the app on their own, and the other software companies in the market would happily steal our code and incorporate it into their own products without giving anything back (GPL or not). So we've chosen to keep it closed.

However, that varies considerably by industry. For example, you'll find a *lot* of OSS in manufacturing, because many manufacturers have tech-savvy staff, and since service outweighs licensing fees in that sphere 20-to-1, vendors are willing to share.

-Josh Berkus
San Francisco

Community Benefit

[bbtom]

Let's just say that your company's app is only useful to few people but has a few kickass subroutines that the developers of software that's not related but not a million miles away might be interested in. That's a good exmaple of open source because if they use your subroutines, then they have to do the whole viral thing and improve the breadth of open source software.

Also, don't underestimate - what may seem useless outside your organisation probably has many uses that people have never thought of until they have the freedom to hack it to bits and change things.