Open source or closed? Convince me.

So you spent 200k of your hard earned cash and two years of your life coding away day in and day out. Finally you have a viable product ready for release.......

depends on the product

@calmyourtities just take Linux for example how many distros are out there. If he only charged 5 bucks for each. WOW one could do a lot of good for the world with that nugget.

@S-falken spent 200k? on what

@fuckWindows other devs salaries let's say it was a big project.

@fuckWindows Outsourcing some work, if it requires servers to store it, hardware necessary for the project, etc.

@S-falken why make it open source then if you've investment so much money in it
... unless you're a millionaire and did it for fun

People still earn working open source with the help of things like open collective. Besides, open source software, on average is of higher quality than that of closed source

@ausername That's a bold statement. I would say you are painting with a very broad brush, and that I could spend a long time coming up with a list that contradicts that statement on a case by case basis.

Open source. How the hell can people check for backdoors otherwise?

@monkeyboy of course you can. What do I know, I'm just 20

You open source it if the software isn't the actual product, it's that easy.

E.g. Intel invests a lot in open source Linux because Intel wants to sell server stuff, and you can't do that if it doesn't run Linux properly. Same with ARM who wants hardware vendors to sell devices with ARM CPUs.

Open sourcing software has the strategic aim to make that software a commodity. That's why it's stupid to open source your core product because you don't want to make it a commodity also for your competitors, you want to earn money.

Don't listen to the open source hippies or you will end up like the OpenSSL guy. Everyone uses the software, and nobody pays you a living.

@linuxxx if the software is the product and he open sources it, nobody's going to pay him unless there's a huge community built around the software (eg. Like the Linux or Blender communities), and not everyone can do that, it takes time.

DEFINITELY CLOSED

YOU GOTTA EARN SOME MONEY SRSLY MAN
YOUR FIRST PRODUCT, THE BIGGEST PRODUCT YOU WORKED FOR YEARS AND YOU ARE RELEASING THAT..... WOW

@RememberMe Take a look at Ardour, then get back to me on this one :)

@linuxxx one swallow doesn't make a summer. Or, is Ardour's success common enough?

@ravijojila I'm not saying it does, merely pointed out a example.

Other example: Red Hat Enterprise Linux (annual revenue of 2+ billion I thought, same goes for ubuntu.

@linuxxx Yes red hat and Ubuntu are making lots of money thanks to the hard work of Linus Torvalds, who was an idiot for giving up his work so others could take it and make millions off his work.
Torvalds net worth = 150 million
Gates net worth = 98.4 Billion

Bet his kids will be like gee thanks dad, Dumb ass!!

I love Linux and Windows but for different reasons, just a disclaimer here.

@S-falken linus torvalds didn’t make linux to profit

@linuxxx again, Ardour is like Blender, it's a project that has been going on for a while and has a significant community (though really, I don't know anyone who uses it because every audio engineer I know prefers Reaper for the same tasks, and really, I can see why. Ardour has horrid UX).

May I also point out that Ardour is developed pretty slowly compared to other Foss projects like Linux and Blender (haven't added anything significantly new since I first heard of it, in 2015), has very little industry adoption in general, has a very small ecosystem of tutorials and users (good luck finding a good beginner's guide compared to say Reaper or Ableton), and it is supported by Harrison Consoles because they use Ardour code for their very commercial DAW, Harrison Mixbus?

I'm not saying that nobody should go FOSS, but it's not a sustainable model to follow in OP's particular case - if he's investing $200k and a year of time and he wants good financial return out of it.

@S-falken indeed, Linus didn't make Linux for profit, and he worked in quite a few companies too (look up Transmeta for example).

It's also wrong to call him an idiot because Canonical and Red Hat have made big money out of it - those companies make money for building and maintaining Linux distros and products built upon those distros (RHEL for example). And also services (maintenance and support, setting up stuff) based on Linux. Not Linux itself. And Canonical/Red Hat etc. put a looot of investment into Linux. It's like calling Microsoft an idiot because other people build games for Windows and earn good money from it.

Also if the Linux kernel was proprietary then it wouldn't have had the meteoritic rise that it did - its success was built on initially people and then companies trying it out, customizing it for their needs, and pooling all the improvements back into the project.

@RememberMe Hey, I have my arguments, you don't agree that it'd work, let's agree to disagree because we're not going to get on the same page anyways :)

@linuxxx I definitely agree with that :p
:)