On 24/09/13 23:28, Neil Van Dyke wrote:
Anyway, I'm thinking of starting a side business of developing general-purpose Racket packages on demand -- modules that satisfy all clients' requirements and are incidentally open-sourced. Perhaps with some discount over normal rates in consideration of the package being open-sourced. Of course, separate from that, I'll continue to open-source modules that I develop for my personal projects ("http://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/";). Anyone have input?
I probably wouldn't offer a discount for open source as it muddies the waters and it can often make good business sense for a client to release a module as open-source. By releasing a module in this way they increase the chances that it will be improved long after their initial investment has been made to create it. In addition if more people are using it and have the chance to report bugs, they can have greater confidence in it. If you are ever asked to improve an open-source module, it again can make sense for them to allow those improvements to be contributed back to the project as they will not have to maintain a private fork and merge in changes from the main project.
This all goes to lower their future costs and increase the potential speed, reliability, interoperability and features of their software. Which is almost definitely the major reason that companies such as Apple, twitter, facebook, google, et al release open-source code and contribute to it.
I hope that you manage to make a success of this venture, and in the process bring more great modules to Racket.
bfn Lorry -- vLife Systems Ltd Registered Office: The Apex, 2 Sheriffs Orchard, Coventry, CV1 3PP Registered in England and Wales No. 06477649 http://vlifesystems.com ____________________ Racket Users list: http://lists.racket-lang.org/users
