Hi there,
That said, the main theme of my enquiry still remains -- I
had never heard of packaging costs until now, and am
curious about quantifying them.
The term «packaging cost» is not really representative of the actual work it
includes.
We are in fact speaking of code and project quality. In that sense, packaging
cost are pareto's principle's 20% of a project. These 20% represent the work
on the project which is never done for internal projects, as it takes a lot of
time compared to what it's paying off.
This may includes :
- technical documentation (as the project is internally developed, knowledge is
available by asking individuals)
- end user documentation (sell training and expertise instead of writing
non-paid end user documentation)
- code cleaning (while it's closed and intern, who cares about clean code ?)
- code documentation (ask your colleague if you want to know what «UGLY HACK»
really means...)
- annoying little bug fixing (every team developer knows the non-documented
workaround)
- setting up a dev environment (svn, ftp stuff, managing rights, takes more
effort for intern needs than an open dev env)
- setting up a project home website with basic information (never done for
intern project if the product is not directly sold)
- setting up a support infrastructure and team (mailing list, specific persons
in charge... done informally when intern)
- ...
If we were in an ideal world, all of this would be done for long even for small
internal project. But in our real world, those points are often abandoned along
the road of good intentions. It really depends on your internal project quality
management. I've seen project with all the above done and well done, and other
where none of it ever existed.
Successful Open Source projects however strongly need those points to be sure
to gather a community of users, developers, and be able to reach a stable point
where the project live by itself without perfusion.
As to answer your specific questions :
Imagine that I am a potential sponsor. You have developed magic
software for your own company. A few users are expressing interest in
that software. You write to the user list that you will put
that software into open source were your packaging costs
met. The following questions --
1. How much are we talking about here?
To stay with pareto's principle, i'd say around 20% of the initial project's
price. It depends on the current quality of the code and project management
type and infrastructur though. The closer it is from the «opensource way» of
doing thing, the less these cost will be.
3. If no one comes up with the packaging costs, would you not
put it into open source, or would you still put it, but just
dump the code into sourceforge and let Darwin take care of it?
As far as a (my one at least) company is concerned, the idea is generally «open
source quality software or don't», as bad code is bad image for the company.
That said, there may sometimes be legal reason leading to open sourcing code
without «packaging» it at all.
4. If you do put it in open source without any packaging
costs being paid to you, would you be losing out on any
particular revenue other than the time spent to put it into
open source?
Time spent to put it into open source is time not spent on other profit-making
project. Then other revenue can be lost due to the opensourcing itself of the
project, but this is another subject.
As to answer to miles about FLOSS project typology, I fully agree with him.
There also is the kind of project written by an individual on its spare time,
with high-standard quality code and infrastructures, which evolves, grows and
turns into a successful big opensource project. Well, I'm still looking for
examples, but I'm sure we can find some :)
vincent
___
Discuss mailing list
Discuss@lists.osgeo.org
http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
