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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?"
Because nothing is more important for a Startup than spending as much money as possible. I recommend going all Microsoft so you can also enjoy the Licensing hell that most of us in corporate IT enjoy. Plus exchange server is so lightweight, you can get away with a single 12 core, 3ghz, 16gb ram and 10tb of 15,000 rpm storage. if you don't go over 100 users.
Although in truth, do NOT host your own email. pay Google for their hosted exchange or someone else. Unless you guys are doing 1990's type startups where you spend as much as possible for stupid reasons. Then hire 2 Exchange people to maintain that abortion of a email server.
Can you tell I spend 10 years supporting a corporate stall of exchange servers? Exchange and Share point are more painful to maintain than a hot poker in the eye.