By some estimates there are over 75,000 pieces of technology currently available as Open Source projects. Of these, approximately 500 are actively maintained and in general use. To avoid incurring unnecessary cost to your organization, or unneeded clutter by "tossing your source code over the wall" into a soon-to-be-forgotten community filesystem, a company considering Open Sourcing needs to ask important questions about its business objectives and capabilities.

Following are some of the key business, legal, technical, market development, and organizational issues that need to be explored when considering Open Sourcing a new or existing technology.

Should We Open Source?

Business/Legal
How will Open Sourcing all or part of our platform increase adoption/sales of our products & services?
How will it affect valuation of the company?
What are the costs of Open Sourcing?

Technical
Which if any components of the platform should be Open Sourced? (APIs, Developer Version, Core Functionality, DB schema, etc.)
Do we seek community involvement in development of the platform, or is Open Sourcing intended to provide a free "starter kit" for users, to spur adoption?
If community involvement is desired, what skillsets are required for a volunteer developer to genuinely contribute to the project?

Market Development
Are there any existing Open Source applications that will compete with the platform?
Is having an Open Source presence a meaningful differentiator in this market?

Organizational
Are our developers available to review and integrate community contributions to the project, and to manage support issues associated with the platform?

How Do We Open Source?

Business/Financial
How do we protect our investment from competitors? (licensing, proprietary value, etc.)
What license should we use? (GPL, Apache, Mozilla, etc.)
Should we establish a separate corporate entity to manage the Open Source code?

Technical
What mechanism do we use to make information and code available to developers, and solicit/integrate feedback and contributions (user groups, community sites, listservs, discussion groups, Slashdot, etc.)?
How do we provide an infrastructure to support access to downloads and informational content about the platform (a .org site, SourceForge, etc.)?
How well-documented is the codebase and how can it be improved?

Market Development
How do we create and communicate with the market for the new platform?
What vehicles do we use to publicize the Open Source code among users who can influence the commercial market?

Organizational
Is a separate group/organization required to manage the Open Source project independently of the commercial platform? If so, how should it be composed?

Back to Services