Open sourcing a commercial site [closed]

To be honest, and this is not likely going to be a popular answer, but to myself, I would keep it closed for a period of time.

The reasons for this are simple, establish your foothold in the marketplace, build your userbase, your brand, then it gives you a mechanism to market your product further by selectively or completely open sourcing components of your system.

Since you are not going to accept pushes you might as well hold on get your code stable and then publish it for others to learn and benefit from. You are still building the service, so its not going to attract too many eyeballs either.

From a business point of you, you might want to have a reasonable community around your service before you opensource it. if you are still budding who knows if its taken up by a stronger competitor. If your idea is patented its a different story.

I say do it for both personal benefit and potential strategic benefit ... afterall, alot of software IS a service

Most open-source projects stand to provide a return in the right circumstances . 别忘了,除非你有一项专利或是一些巨大的进步,它是如此复杂和深不可测,以至于没有人能重新实施它。 if they want to they will anyway , so you have little protection staying closed source anyway ... even more interesting is that the open-source equivalent may well overtake your proprietary one if it garners support.

People may send you great ideas you never thought of, or take your codebase in a direction you would not have predicted. Unless you have significant 价值 in terms of IP or strategic position tied up in the source code ... releasing it will probably do more good than harm.

Also, by being first to the open-source arena with your code, you gain control over any resulting community driven development ... 如果Somone重新实现了您的功能并打开了源代码…你能在任何战线上竞争吗?

I know it is a cliche, but probably for good reason, but read The Cathedral and the Bazaar 随笔 Open Source as a Signalling Device - An Economic Analysis which is an interesting read. Michael E. Porter's texts on competition analysis are interesting when held up against the mixed value economics and competitive forces of open source and shows how disruptive open-sourcing a product can be to competitors ... and how it can add value to your market position. Also, whilst counterintuative, it can raise the barriers to a successful entry by competitors.

更多的食物供思考 缺点 公开采购:

1. What the DoD thinks of open source
2. Alfred H. Essa "Innovation and strategic advantage: lessons from open source" (警告,日志链接)

您希望从使代码开源中获得什么好处?If you don't want the input of other developers then there are very few advantages and a whole lot of potential disadvantages.