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 it has no value

[jellomizer]

Normally products are released Open Source as that they are not part of their business model.
If your business model is based on consulting, then for the most part it makes sense for most of your products that you make to be Open Source as you are not expecting to make money selling software, but consulting services.
Even if your model is selling software, particular tools that you make are outside of your sales area. Say if you make Electronic Health Records as your core business, your Web Framework that you made, or tools that you use for searching data etc... You might want to Open Source.
There is some advantages in Opening Source such systems.
1. You might get some support outside the company to fix bugs, make improvements etc...
2. Your company will get some good will for releasing the free tool.
3. Your code may create a workforce trained in your system, so there is less training for new hires.
4. You may be able to become the standard, vs trying to deal with a large sets of different methods all closed and expensive. You could kill your competition from you pet project.