Ask Slashdot: Can Closed Source Software Transition To the GPL Successfully? 99
colinneagle writes "Open Source guy Bryan Lunduke has experienced the difficulties of migrating a successful closed source project to an open license first-hand, but still believes — or at least wants to believe — that it can be done. He writes: 'Occasionally, someone makes a go of it, to take a good piece of closed source software and release the source code under a nice, open license. In fact, I did just that about a year ago. I tried to take a software development tool (along with some video games) that I had developed (and was earning a good living from) and migrate them to the GPL with continued development funded via donations. The results were...disastrous. Within a very short period of time of going Open Source, the total funding for the projects fell to less than 20% of what was being brought in via sales when the software was Closed Source, which almost completely impeded the ability to fund continued development. Luckily, I was able to recover and get things back on track, but it was definitely not a fun experience.'" How viable is migrating a closed source project to something open?
OpenOffice (Score:5, Insightful)
OpenOffice started as StarOffice. Seems pretty viable.
Poor wording (Score:5, Insightful)
I read the question and though, "What? How can it be hard not to succeed? You just switch the license." Then I read the summary and realized the real question was "Can closed source software transition to the gpl profitably?" That is a question I understand a lot better.
I don't know a clear answer. I do know that donations for that kind of product are not too likely to be a good way to bring in income.
You need a compatible business model (Score:5, Insightful)
For End User, Open-source = Free (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:OpenOffice (Score:5, Insightful)
If you look at it from an Open Source perspective Open (and Libre) Office are great projects.
Looking at them from a business perspective, it is hard to make money from OO.o. There is a reason Oracle dumped it at the Apache foundation.
Betteridge is wrong in this case! (Score:4, Insightful)
From TFS of all places: " In fact, I did just that about a year ago."
But then TFS then goes on to say that he almost went broke doing it and we find out that the real (but implied question) is actually "How can I get people to donate to my pet project?"
Re:You need a compatible business model (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:OpenOffice (Score:5, Insightful)
True, but TFS is actually asking a slightly different question to the headline.
The full question is "Can a commercial software project continue to bring in enough money to fund itself if it goes open source?". And that is a very good question.
As regards Star/OpenOffice, Sun bought Star Division. They made StarOffice 5.2 available free (as in beer) but when they opened the source, a **lot** of the code had been licensed from third parties. Sun didn't have the rights to open source that, so they had to subsidise OpenOffice for years while the code that couldn't be opensourced was rewritten. I'd be astonished if they ever covered their costs from it.
Yes, but that's not what he's asking. (Score:5, Insightful)
I've done it myself (with the original version of OpenToken [stephe-leake.org]). It worked out great for everyone. The community got a great tool, and the company got accellerated development and code excercise out of a tool they were previously using in-house. Everyone was a winner.
However, that doesn't appear to be what he's asking. It appears that he was defining "success" as donation revenue being higher than proprietary software "toll" revinue, in particular for a game. That's a totally different question, and has almost nothing to do with Open Source licensing. Proprietary "freeware" games face exactly this issue, so the sensible thing to do is look at how they work. I'm not an expert on this model, but I understand they generally have a very low donation rate. So if you want to may it pay better, it would have to be something that will gain way more users as freeware than would have bought it as a traditional "toll booth" model game. Here's an SE question [stackoverflow.com] on this exact subject (warning, the answers aren't encouraging).
Most folks making money in OpenSource software that I'm aware of do it by selling services associated with the OpenSource software. For instance, that's how Red Hat makes money off of cywgin, and how AdaCore makes money off of the gnu Ada compiler (Gnat). I'm unaware of anybody doing that with OpenSource games. Possibilites in that space that come to mind are taking donations for feature additions (top grossing feature gets coded next!), or hosting ads on the game server.
Re:The Wrong Questions (Score:5, Insightful)
More importantly, why the hell did he stopped selling the game, and started getting donations instead?
It could be made GPL and still be sold.
I don't think the number of people who would copy a version someone compiled from the GPL version and published on a website without donating would be very different from the number of people who would just pirate the game if it was not GPL.
Re:The Wrong Questions (Score:4, Insightful)
I do a "Software as a Service" model. You pay me, you get what I write.
Just to be clear, this is NOT "software as a service". SAAS is where they pay you to use the software (for example through a web interface) but they do not get either the compiled code or source code. You are working as a contract developer. In copyright terms it is a "work for hire."
I agree that use of GPL completely depends on how the payment-for-work model for a given piece of software works. If one's revenue depends on artificial scarcity, GPL is not really viable as its intention is to remove artificial scarcity.
I have seen it go the other way (Score:2, Insightful)
I have seen it go the other way, and it's a much easier transition. Examples include Android and OS X, where the code is only Open Sourced after release, since the license does not require development to occur in the open, it only requires the code be handed over on release, and then only if it's requested, in most cases. Other examples include WINE, which begat Crossover Office, which has proprietary chunks, and MySQL, which has proprietary back ends available, if you want actual transactions instead of pretend ones.
If you GPL the entire product, someone will start nightly builds outside your organization; this happens today with both Android and ChromeOS, and there's no way you can control this to the point of preventing it, at least without going to a secureboot option, and keeping the binary signing keeys internal to your organization.
Given the above, there is almost not a chance in hell of you getting as much income from an Open Source model as you will get from a closed source model, unless your closed source version isn't really in demand anyway, or unless you intentionally leave features out of the Open Source version, as has happened with both WINE and MySQL.
The best you can hope for is to Open Source the tactical portions of your product in a way that's (A) useful enough to third parties that they are willing to commit some development resources to maintaining the code, and (B) that it's still useless enough that you don't end up with some zealot coming up with a fully Open Source version of the product you are attempting to sell based on its strategic values (something BitKeeper failed to do successfully).
There have been several posts over the past couple of days complaining about not being able to use derivative works of proprietary (copyrighted) data files for things like Windows registry/crapware cleaners, etc., all of which are complaining about the inability to lock down the strategic value (or, contrarily, complaining about companies attempting to lock down their strategic value).
In general, the Open Source model is not a good match for vertical markets. E.g. if I owned a moving company, there'd be no way I'd want a competing moving company getting out from under their moving software license fees (which are onerous) because of software that I funded development on in order to get myself out from under those same fees -- the entire application has strategic competitive value for my company.
The Open Source model is also not a good model for projects where the strategic value is in the glue code between Open Source modules -- as stated previously, this allows someone to compete by stringing the parts together using their own business logic, at a very low cost, and my margins are completely dependent on barriers to entry for third parties. To go back to the moving company example, with heavy fluctuations in consumables, like truck fuel, my company is already at a heavy disadvantage compared to large companies, since it's a cash flow business for smaller companies, and the larger companies can make capitol investments in long term fuel pricing contracts, which can get them steep discounts.
I have also seen the "Give away the software, well service/support" model blow up on people; perhaps the most spectacular example of that would be Cygnus Software, which has become a shell housing something totally different than compiler development.
My general sense of things is that if you are a programmer, there are companies who will pay you to work on Open Source; Google is a good example, since they have more money than God from advertising revenue, and are willing to spend it on buying street cred/prestiege by hiring prominent Open Source people. If you want to found a company on it, you are going to be hard put to make it pay off.