The Business of Open Source
Companies can be extremely cautious about using open source software, but a lot of that wariness has eroded in recent years. Possibly the realization that open source isn’t really free has helped ease the minds of those who thought they were being offered something for nothing and were looking for the catch. But people don’t trust things they don’t understand, and a lot of the distrust of open source arises because people still wonder why anyone would build open source code in the first place. If you’re one such, take a look at this CIO magazine article that describes the ways that companies make money from freely distributed code.
The one enduring argument against open source is the GNU General Purpose License requirement that anyone modifying open source code must release those modifications to the community under the same license terms. Since the boundaries of a component containing the modified code can be fuzzy, managers fear that if they embrace open source they will be compelled to furnish code developed in-house and give away valuable intellectual property. Apparently suits to enforce this are becoming more common, so it’s safest to keep open source out of those systems that provide your company with its key differentiation from the competition. But for most companies, the secret sauce is in just one or two systems, if any.
You don’t have to base your business model around open source. But the bottom line is that – as long as your developers are mindful about when and where they borrow code – you can save a lot of time and money by making judicious choices about when to buy proprietary software, when to develop in house and when to go open source.
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