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Thoughts on F/OSS (2/10): why making F/OSS?

This is part of a 10 blog posts series on F/OSS thoughts, extracted from a talk that I gave recently.

Nothing is free. If you spend some of your time on a project where others can take the code, modify and redistribute, there must be a good reason. Otherwise you would probably better off spending time with friends at the pub...

When thinking about motivations for doing F/OSS work, I found 3 non-exclusive categories.

1. Having fun, developing skills and advertising yourself. The example that came to my mind was IzPack as I can only speak for myself. I know a few other projects that I suspect are in the same case, but again, I can't speak for others. Here the motivation is clear: you are investing on yourself:
   • now, because you get some fun
   • for the future: you build new engineering, management and communication skills that will help you being more attractive in the future.
2. Grab some strategic market shares. Some software market shares have lots of value, not necessarily because they are direct revenue streams, but because you are better off having them than your competitors. The web browsers market is a great example. Nobody sells web browser software licenses anymore, yet the war is fierce in this place. A few years back Microsoft had nearly no competition, and its infamous web browser was what everybody but a few geeks with beards would use to access web pages. This put Microsoft in a strong position not only to capture users to their web services, but also to develop their server-side technologies that would naturally "work best on IE". Mozilla Firefox is there mainly to take some market shares and ensure that competition exists in this field. Google Android is another great example. The company has a strong interest in people accessing the web from mobile phones, and preferably use as often as possible Google tools (mail, search, agenda, etc). Indeed, access to those tools means traffic, which means ads, which means money. Having a competitor dominating this market like MS did with IE would not be great for Google, as the said competitor would naturally favour its very own services, to the detriment of Google.
3. Make business. In many cases, doing opensource is just another mean to do business. Opensource means potentially more users. Opensource can be a powerful marketing tool, as more people can easily test a technology, and then be redirected to paid tools and services. The Spring Framework, MySQL or Talend ETL are examples of making opensource for business. If you can find a business model around your project then opensource is a wise choice.

Related posts:

1. Thoughts on F/OSS (3/10): main business models
2. Thoughts on F/OSS (1/10): quick facts
3. Thoughts on F/OSS (6/10): 4 tips for managing a project
4. The limits of opensource for small shops
5. Thoughts on F/OSS (5/10): hosting your project