Ask Slashdot: Can SaaS Be Both Open Source and Economically Viable?

An anonymous reader writes: The CTO behind Lucidchart, an online diagramming app, recently cited the open source rbush project as an invaluable tool for helping implement an "in-memory spatial index" that "increased spatial search performance by a factor of over 1,000 for large documents." My question is this: what risks does a SaaS company like Lucidchart face in making most of their own code public, like Google's recent move with Chrome for Android, and what benefits might be gained by doing so? Wouldn't sharing the code just generate more users and interest? Even if competitors did copy it, they'd always be a step behind the latest developments. Have a question for Slashdot's readers? Take a look at other recent questions first to see if someone else has had a similar question. And if not, ask away! The more details and context you include, the more likely your question will be selected.

Comments

GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL)

[tepples]

The GNU Affero General Public License version 3 was designed to preserve user freedom and flexibility even when software runs on a leased server. It ensures that users can obtain and improve the software that they are using even when they are currently running it on someone else's computer. That way, if a particular service goes out of business, its customers can spin up an instance on their own servers with little interruption.

It depends on the code

[Todd Knarr]

Google's Chrome would be a good example. Google's business is not selling browsers. Their business is selling advertising. Many of the services they offer to attract eyeballs (and data) for their business require a good browser. So they don't lose any revenue by giving their browser away and letting other people build browsers based on the code, in fact the more modern browsers out there that're all compatible the better for Google. In that situation it makes sense to open-source their Chrome code. For any business, if the code's utility code that's necessary for the business but not a significant part of the parts that separate your offering from everyone else's it'd make sense to open-source it. You don't lose anything, you gain brownie points, and you may be able to use the bug fixes and enhancements others make without having to spend your own resources on them.

You don't, however, see Google open-sourcing the details of their analytics algorithms, or the exact code that drives PageRank, or the other things that set them apart from other search engines. Those things they need to keep secret because if they got out Google would lose a competitive advantage. Open-sourcing code like that would cost a business revenue, so it shouldn't be open-sourced.