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Ask Slashdot: Open Vs. Closed-Source For a Start-Up
atamagabakkaomae writes "Together with a friend, I am starting up a company in Japan that develops sensors used in motion capture. For these sensors we develop hardware and software. Part of the software development is an open-source toolkit called openMAT. We have some special purpose algorithms that we developed ourselves and that are better than our competitor's technology. I first wanted to publish everything open-source to spark interest in our company and to do development in collaboration with the community. My company partner disagreed and said that we will lose our technological advantage if we open-source it. So I eventually published only a part of the toolkit open-source and closed the most interesting code. How do you guys think that open-sourcing your code-base affects a company's business? Is it wrong for a small company to give away precious intellectual property like that or will it on the contrary help the development of the company?"
Tom Preston-Werner from GitHub recently posted his take on this question:
http://tom.preston-werner.com/2011/11/22/open-source-everything.html
The tl;dr version of it -- open source everything except what is intrinsic to your core business value. My personal take is that if you can't beat your competitors with a mostly open book, you won't beat them with a closed book either. Hire the best people you can find, be thoughtful about your product, and hope for a bit of luck.
I think the key here is the question of what is it you plan to sell. If you plan to sell the software.. opening up the source would probably be counter-productive. If you plan to sell a solution, of which the software is a part.. then, you might have some advantage.
Red hat, for instance, does not sell operating systems. They sell support. Indeed, most of the software they ship isn't even theirs, but by going open source, they have the license to ship it all together and support the whole package.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
There is a little company called Red Hat, perhaps you have heard of them. Their competitors have had a distinct habit of taking their Free Software and adding a few pieces of proprietary code. These additions generally made the competition nicer to use than Red Hat, but for whatever reason the competitors never were able to gain any significant market share.
Caldera, SuSE, Novell, and most recently Oracle have all taken a crack at Red Hat using software that was largely based on Red Hat's own distribution. So far this strategy has produced nothing but failure.
Willow Garage open sourced the software they use to run their PR2 robot
I think Willow Garage almost had to because they were using lots of open source tools in the first place. ROS is based on playerstage, which is GPL, and a lot of the heavy computer vision stuff is OpenCv, which itself was originally open-sourced by Intel. And the deal with everyone using ROS had a lot to do with development shifting from playerstage to ROS 'cause they were similar but ROS was saner, so they became the standard in large part 'cause they improved on the existing open source standard rather then trying to create some kind of large scale shift in the community. Plus, Willow Garage is as much experimental lab as company, so I don't know if it works as a good case study 'cause it sort of has a weird mix of end goals.
Willow Garage also gained a lot of cred by taking over OpenCV from intel and actively maintaining it, which isn't something a fledgling company can do but is worth considering. They adopted the library 'cause it was critical to their business and considered something of a standard in the vision community, which meant a lot of people were already using it, so it was popular enough that maintaining it was seen as a good thing.
open source modern art: laser taggi