[OSGeo-Discuss] Open Location Services

[P Kishor]

On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 8:38 AM, Miles Fidelman
<mfidelman at traversetechnologies.com> wrote:
> P Kishor wrote:
>>
>> On Tue, Nov 3, 2009 at 3:47 AM, Cameron Shorter
>> <cameron.shorter at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> As you are probably aware, just dumping code into sourceforge is not an
>>> effective way to start a successful Open Source project.
>>>
>>>
>>
>> The above makes sense, but honestly, I had never heard of this until
>> now, and I have been tinkering with open source for almost a decade
>> now. Most open source projects seemed organic to me. Someone had an
>> itch, they scratched it, they put it out, and the project either
>> gathered traction, or it died. Seems like my scholarship of open
>> source has been lacking in this aspect hugely.
>>
>
> Actually, the history of successful open source projects (long-lived, widely
> adopted, well supported by a broad community) is very different than "having
> an itch to scratch."
>

Well said. I apologize for unintentionally making it seem that I was
conflating "itch to scratch" with lack of funds. Not so. Larry Wall
was gainfully employed when he developed Perl and released it into the
wilds. That is well documented. And, as you note below, variations on
this model abound. Our own Steve Lime, bless his heart, was and is
gainfully employed when he developed and continues to develop
MapServer. The nice folks at DM Solutions and Refractions built a
successful business around open source, releasing and benefitting from
their largesse.

That said, the main theme of my enquiry still remains -- I had never
heard of "packaging" costs until now, and am curious about quantifying
them.

Imagine that I am a potential sponsor. You have developed <magic
software> for your own company. A few users are expressing interest in
that software. You write to the user list that you will put that
software into open source were your "packaging" costs met. The
following questions --

1. How much are we talking about here?

2. Of course, any price is worth it if someone is willing to pay it,
but how to determine if the amount being asked in #1 above is
commensurate with the value of the product being considered, and is in
line with the value of similar products?

3. If no one comes up with the packaging costs, would you not put it
into open source, or would you still put it, but just "dump the code
into sourceforge" and let Darwin take care of it?

4. If you do put it in open source without any packaging costs being
paid to you, would you be losing out on any particular revenue other
than the time spent to put it into open source?




> I've seen several major development paths for successful projects:
>
> 1. Funded research project that gets widely adopted.  Open sourced as a way
> to maintain availability and support.  Classic example: Apache (started as
> the NCSA web daemon).
>
> 2. Variant of the above: Project that starts as a research project ends up
> as a hybrid open-source/commercial enterprise.  Classic examples: Sendmail,
> PostgreSQL.
>
> 3. Internally funded project - by a university or corporate team - open
> sourced as a way to reduce support costs and/or widen adoption.  Generally
> retains some ties to originators.  Examples:  Sympa (mailing list manager
> funded by a consortium of French universities), Erlang, Zope.
>
> 4. The jury is still out on the various projects that have been developed
> for purely commercial reasons, with an open source ("community") version
> released as both a way to broaden the market and to reduce
> development/support costs by leveraging outside contributors (e.g.,
> OpenSolaris, Aptana Studio, ...).   The virtualization space seems to be a
> place where the uncertainties associated with this model are playing out
> (e.g., would you stake your business on Xen or VirtualBox?).
>
> Not sure how I'd characterize the various BSD unix varients, and Linux is a
> clear outlier - that may well be as close to an "itch to scratch" that
> succeeded as there is.
>
> What these all have in common is that:
>
> i. somebody and/or some organization had a serious internal reason for
> developing a piece of software, and in almost all cases had a source of
> financial support for the work
>
> ii. there are serious "business" reasons for open sourcing the code -
> broadening a user base, reducing development and support costs, etc. - and
> serious attention was/is paid to organization and management issues
>
>
> Miles Fidelman
>
> --
> Miles R. Fidelman, Director of Government Programs
> Traverse Technologies 145 Tremont Street, 3rd Floor
> Boston, MA  02111
> mfidelman at traversetechnologies.com
> 857-362-8314
> www.traversetechnologies.com
>
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>



-- 
Puneet Kishor http://www.punkish.org
Carbon Model http://carbonmodel.org
Charter Member, Open Source Geospatial Foundation http://www.osgeo.org
Science Commons Fellow, http://sciencecommons.org/about/whoweare/kishor
Nelson Institute, UW-Madison http://www.nelson.wisc.edu
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