In today’s media (heck, in yesterday’s too, it’s been all the hype for the last few years) you’ll read a lot about open source software. The argument from the geek community goes something like this: “If you give away all your intellectual property, other people can extend it and make it better without any charge to you! Besides, intellectual property shouldn’t exist anyway.”
While open source is the bandwagon that everyone wants to jump on, very few people have a solid roadmap as to how a company can actually make money on that model. After all, if people can download your product for free, what incentive do they have to pay you? At the same time, if you don’t, the online community has a tendency to “flame” you; the electronic version of telling the world that you kill puppies for fun. This can be devastating to a company, destroying their image and costing lots of money in missed sales.
While studying for an upcoming interview, I stumbled across a Harvard Business review case study published earlier this year. HBR case studies were always a bit of a joke in the MBA class, beginning as they did with someone looking out the window and pondering some deep problem. This one in particular is written in a way I don’t care for, as it leaves a definite bias towards one course of action in the reader’s mind (and that course is one that I disagree with).
However, there are four bits of commentary at the end that I found very insightful. Each has its own predictable bias (the CEO of Sun, now supposedly an “open source” company, argues for opening the code, whereas the lawyer argues against it), but taken together, they give a lot of information on the necessary considerations and various options available to software companies. If you’re in the industry, or if you have any interest in it, you might enjoy reading this.
Some day, I plan to write one of these myself. When that day comes, I’ll probably have some armchair blogger like me critiquing it on the web too; such is the circle of life, eh? 
