Another commercial open source systems management software product has recently appeared on our radar. Hyperic, founded in 2004, is going after the enterprise market.
The following quote is from the Hyperic blog:
Enterprise customers are open to participating in communities and are eager to reap the benefits…. but they don’t care about having access to the source code of a product or participating as much as some would like to think.
Makes sense, not many enterprises have Java developers just sitting around twiddling their thumbs. So, if the enterprise customers aren’t interested in contributing code to the project, and aren’t interested in participating in the community, why open source the code?
Especially when the blog follows on with this:
Customers and vendors still don’t seem to get the notion that open sourcing technology does not immediately relinquish your ownership of it. The use of the GPL makes this even worse, by suggesting that dual licensing is the only way ‘around’ this. This causes undue confusion by potential customers who spend time drafting ‘no-open-source’ policies.
By using the GPL, you are damaging the product’s appeal for some potential customers.
I am a fan of open source, but at least in the enterprise space, I really can’t see the appeal to the producer. By open sourcing the product, you aren’t going to get much customer contribution to the code base and the licence may well damage the product’s appeal. I don’t get it!
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