Hannu’s Blog

The source code for our Open Sound System product was “open sourced” under GPLv2 and CDDL about three months ago. There were several reasons why we did so.

1. Third party driver developers can contribute their changes to the common OSS source tree.
2. We wanted to give our customers a guarantee that they can keep using OSS even 4Front Technologies goes out of business.
3. By having the source code our customers can customize the code for their purposes.
4. When large number of developers can see the source code they may find bugs that might otherwise stay undetected for years.
5. We wanted to make OSS as an acceptable sound subsystem solution for all Unix/Linux/POSIX/whatever compatible operating systems.
6. We wanted to promote an open source software concept where everybody who uses open source software from other companies/developers also contribute their own development to the community.
7. We wanted to do all the above in a way that makes it possible to us to continue our work as professional software developers.
8. We wanted to continue to sell OSS as a commercial product to the customers who want to use OSS from their proprietary/inhouse software.

We decided to release the source code of OSS under two commonly used open source licenses that were GPLv2 and CDDL. We would have preferred just one license scheme but out of all ones these two provided widest coverage of the open source software market. These two licenses are compatible with all the different “open source” licenses so far. We didn’t release OSS under licenses like BSD because we feel they are “half closed source” licenses.

Did this licensing model work? The answer is yes and no. The success story is that we have already got several talented developers to contribute their work back to OSS. What was disappointing is that open sourcing actually decreased our sales significantly. We are in unfortunate position of providing only device drivers that are supposed to be free.

So for us open sourcing means kissing goodbye to any hope of revenue. The customers who previously bought OSS licenses don’t do it any more. They think that having the source code means that they have at least equal rights than we had.

So what can we do? Developing OSS is no longer profitable which means we should find some other way to feed our families. Who will then continue developing OSS for you?

You may thing we could start selling OSS T-shirts to fund the development. Do you have ever bought any T-shirts to sponsor some open source project? At least I have never done so.

I tried to add some Google ads to our open source WEB pages and to the OSS Programmer’s Guide (which have about 2000 hits/day). In two weeks I have got exactly $00.00 in that way.

So does anybody have better ideas?