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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?"
I don't know if it is that straight forward. I wouldn't recommend open sourcing your first round of code if it is the core of your business, but then again you should have copyright to your own code and if you are clever enough it gives you street cred when you try to sell the stuff. Competition is usually busy trying to figure out their own problems and if they copy from you, you can use it in your marketing and perhaps in future lawsuits. It's pretty rare that you've actually invented something really new and if you have I guess patenting would be to way to protect that. If you want to drum up publicity I doubt going open source is going to do that in your prospective customers.