Andy Jarrett // Code. Develop. Create.

Should Bluedragon go open source?

Vince Bonfanti is asking on his blog would it be worth open sourcing Bluedragon. He has set out quite a few questions like "Which edition would you want to see" and though all viable I think the answers might not be as helpful as they appear.

Open source is great, but i'll be first to put my hand up in saying that its good cause its free. Sure i've brought wish list items for developers to say thank you but to most developers cost is everything. That's not to say you cannot make a profit here though!

What OS does allow you to do is penetrate the market and get your product out there legally in the developers hands. Its kinda on the same path as Winzip's never really ending trial period, and even Photoshop in the past had a similar setup. Though you do have your product out there and you are not seeing the revenue it is these groups of people that would of never paid the full price for the product in the first place. Don't get me wrong, this isn't right, but it is the way of the world.

Saying that Redhat/Fedora, MySQL seem to be doing well with the OS business model and that's because when your developer move into a corporate/business/enterprise environment eventually their piers and managers want security and you get that through support licensing.

Should BD go open source and i'll be honest, for me Yes, but that's not cause I want to play around under the hood (though having the ability there is nice to know), but so I could run my own personal server with fully legal software. Its probably not the answer Vince was looking for, but I wouldn't be lost revenue as at the moment I am in shared environment, and until I can afford the CFMX licence from whichever provider I'm not going to move. So the question is how many clients who have paid for licenses would swap that over to support contracts in the future?


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