What Goes Into a Decision To Take Software From Proprietary To Open Source

Lemeowski writes: It's not often that you get to glimpse behind the curtain and see what led a proprietary software company to open source its software. Last year, the networking software company Midokura made a strategic decision to open source its network virtualization platform MidoNet, to address fragmentation in the networking industry. In this interview, Midokura CEO and CTO Dan Mihai Dumitriu explains the company's decision to give away fours years of engineering to the open source community, how it changed the way its engineers worked, and the lessons learned along the way. Among the challenges was helping engineers overcome the culture change of broadcasting their work to a broader community.

Comments

Re:When you're not making money from it anymore

[Karmashock]

This.

The funniest open source projects from big companies I have seen have basically been fuck yous to competitors. "what's that? I'll make a competing product and give away for free!"...

Think of all the big open source projects from blue chip companies and most of them have been motivated by a mixture of spite and contempt. Its kind of delightful in a dark way.