What Goes Into a Decision To Take Software From Proprietary To Open Source 45
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.
When you're not making money from it anymore (Score:5, Insightful)
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We still need to give credit where the credit is d (Score:2)
But we need to give credit for companies that open source their products, even if those products are no longer bringing in $$$ for them
There have been times I wrote to software companies asking them to open source their truly obsolete products, such as compilers that run on OS/2, just so that younger generations, at least those who are curious enough to look at the source, could learn a thing or two how a compiler works
They refused
Of course they have all their rights to refuse to open up the source codes of
Re:When you're not making money from it anymore (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:When it has no value (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:When it has no value (Score:5, Insightful)
The best things to open source in this scenario are the things that you would buy from a third party, if you trusted the supplier enough. For proprietary software, a second source is almost always impossible. For hardware, it's often quite difficult, depending on the component. Switching from Intel to AMD is quite easy in a lot of cases, switching from a Qualcomm SoC to a Samsung one is more effort. Switching other components can be very hard. Service companies are a lot easier (switching from one law or accounting firm to another is much easier than retooling a production line).
Apple's involvement with LLVM is quite a good example here. Their ecosystem absolutely depends on high-quality compilers existing for OS X and iOS. With Classic MacOS and early versions of OS X, they outsourced this to Metrowerks, who produced quite a competent IDE and set of tools. Then Metrowerks, their sole supplier, was bought by Freescale and development on the Mac versions basically disappeared. They had some involvement in GCC development inherited from NeXT, but GCC was problematic for IDE integration (the parser is designed in such a way that it's impossible to use for syntax highlighting, for example - it does constant folding very early so you can't differentiate 4 and 2+2 in the source). They decided that they needed to bring compiler development in-house, but it was a lot cheaper to do so as part of an open source ecosystem. Apple now contributes something like 40% of the code to LLVM and that vast majority of what other people do directly benefits them, so they're effectively halving their costs. And, of course, giving away the IDE and compiler tools for free (rather than charging, as Metrowerks did) makes people more likely to start developing for Apple platforms.
Re: (Score:3)
Open source means garbage software. The features and quality assurance are usually terrible.
Right on dude! That's why IBM is a flash in the pan money losing company. Google is just a bubble waiting to burst.
I could go on - but you beat me to it. How's the football coaching applications going? Any decent offers from the big league yet?
Re: (Score:2)
Dear coward
Actually, I think both your examples prove his point.
Which prove only that you don't get the point. IBM wasn't making money from software - but they relied on software to make money on hardware. By using Open Source they greatly reduced costs. Don't let that stop you from building strawmen from the straws you're grasping at - 'cause you know so much more that one of less than half a dozen companies on the planet that has been in continuous profit for over a century.
Google doesn't even have a product that it sells. It makes more than 90% of its revenue by giving away mediocre content for free and then attaching advertising to it.
Bullshit - where do you think they get their income from - the fucking internet fair
Re: (Score:2)
Dear coward
Um, Google's search engine and the infrastructure around it (above the OS level) is all closed source.
Is their no limit to your bullshit? Go back to writing 9/11 and Illuminati conspiracies - there is little secret about what Google uses for their search engine and infrastructure ('cause they Open Source it and publicise it regularly), only the implementation is considered company property. You rely on the lazy who won't check your claims - and the stupid who'll believe that because you offer no proof it must be a conspiracy is a sure sign of bullshit. /. readers won't fall for that tired cir
Most
Re: (Score:1)
How the h**l do shoes have anything to do with the failings of systemd?
Dramatic Shift (Score:1)
I am working on a project that has recently been released as open source. The reason for it I believe is that the company felt it needed to change their sales model in order to reach more users. The aim here is the get the return off licensing fees.