On Sun, 29 Apr 2001, Adi Fairbank wrote:
> Thanks Gunther,
>
> We actually have discussed releasing our entire application open source.
> I personally would love to release it, being the chief architect, but
> there are other people involved who have put in a lot of work
> (directional/advisement/guidance... not coding) who would not benefit
> nearly as much as I would from it being open source.
>
> Also, as a company we have to evaluate what the best option is
> financially. We are currently a pretty low-budget operation, and if we
> release it what will prevent someone with deep pockets to come along, take
> it, and then dump tons of money into marketing it under a different brand
> name? I'm sure we could devise a license that would prevent such an
> occurrence, but it would have to be a pretty restrictive license, which
> would in itself limit the interest in the software.
I am in a similar situation with my company. Our main business is
building small to medium scale web sites for small businesses. Our
customers can build and maintain their websites and email accounts through
a web frontend (ie choosing a template, WYSIWYG editor, menu
builder, etc...). Everything we do is written in perl with a MySQL or
PostgreSQL backend, and I am in the process of mod_perl'ifying most of it.
Any new custom jobs that we do are also done in mod_perl. To simplify our
development, and to keep our development and design teams separate we have
developed a bunch of modules that simplify life in general (a template
engine, a DBI wrapper, a form handler, etc...).
We have talked about throwing our modules and apps out to the masses, but
like most other companies, we are faced with competition. A big part of
our marketing push is the easy-to-use tools for managing your website.
If we give these tools away to our compeditors, then we loose our
advantage in the marketplace.
Perhaps once our position is more stable in the market we will be able to
contribute back to the community with the work we have done...
--
Cees Hek
SiteSuite Corporation
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
