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

Rifles and shotguns

[Mattcelt]

I think you'll be surprised at how many will want to use your application. There are usually some surprising consistencies between business types which may not occur to those who haven't worked in each. So don't be surprised if your application which was made for an energy company becomes, with a tweak or two, very popular among, say, watch manufacturers.

One of my favorite ideas in marketing was always that you will almost always hit a larger market than your target, no matter how specialized your target. Like Avon's skin-so-soft, for instance. You know, the mosquito repellant?

I only have one question

[iCEBaLM]

What the hell is a vertical market?

Verticals.

[LWATCDR]

I just do not think an OSS vertical will work. The main reason that companies buy vertical app is they do not WANT to know how to use a computer.
A lot of verticals could be writen in Microsoft Access. While I am not fond of Access for a lot of the office management type stuff it would work. People pay for verticals so that they do not have to fuss around with putting it together themselves.
When non computer people get software to run there company they just want it to work and they want someone to call that knows how to fix what ever is wrong or they have screwed up.
Now you could charge for support but then you have to fund the support staff. You have to pay for phones, techs, and clerical staff to do billing.
Finaly how will people ever find out about your program? Are you going to pay to advertise a free program in what ever trade publication that market uses?
Now providing source when you sell a system might be good but if you are doing support how do you support something that somebodies kid has hacked and re compiled.?
I am not saying it can not work but you might be suprised what a HUGE pain in the butt it will be.

My Experience with This

[Mikkeles]

Quite a few years ago I worked (as a subsystem owner/guru) for a company which provided its product's source code to the clients. Thus it was limited open source and not free as in speech or beer.
The client base was technically literate (semiconductor manufacturers) and there was only one other competitor worldwide.
The code base was more than 12 years old (at the time) and had undergone much enhancement and change, so it was getting pretty crufty. It took ~24 hours to compile and link from scratch.

Generally, the experience was positive. The clients liked the fact that they could, to a degree, fix their own bugs (which fixes we would propogate to everyone else after appropriate review). It was easy for us to log into their system to perform JIT repairs. They could compile with optional modules to produce a test system to see if they liked the addition before paying for it. And we occasionally got enhancements that we could incorporate for everyone.

The downsides were quite minimal. There was little that the competitor could take directly as the software architectures and structure were too different. Also, one was in FORTRAN, the other in COBOL. As far as copying features; they can do that by reading your product brochure! A couple of companies enabled optional modules in production systems without paying (they got caught when we revamped the DB structure and the automated conversion tools found them out). When the iron curtain came down, we found there were four or so unpurchased systems in eastern Europe.