Posted on Monday 5 December 2005 - Popularity: unranked
Too many companies are releasing their product and calling it ‘open source’, but between the real open source (1.0) that’s based on the original idea of a community driven project development process and open source 2.0, where a company just opens the code, is a pretty big one, one that should be avoided whenever possible.
Open up the decision making in your project. Foster multiple companies to support your product, make it so that your company is not the centre of the products universe. By doing this you will get innovation and stability in your offering, and you will grow the pie, similar to how you get VC funding instead of just using your own cash. It will take your product (and you) onto the next level (ubiquity).
Choosing an open source licensing model like the GPL is just the first step to a real open source project and more and more companies forget about this. It may work out for a while, but it’s definitely not optimal and can end in a dying project if that decision-making company loses interest for whatever reason.
