Frederick Giasson has shared his thoughts on the utility of open source projects. He writes, “In a previous blog post, I wrote about how Open Source may be unnatural, and even counter intuitive, to many people. However, that really begs some questions evident with my current company’s strategy. Why have Mike Bergman and I chosen to develop no less than three major open source projects (structWSF, conStruct and the Semantic Components)?… Why have we open sourced all our software? Why has open source formed the core business strategy of Structured Dynamics in the last three years? How have we been able to profitably sustain the company, even in the midst of the global economic crisis that began in 2008?”

He continues, “There are multiple reasons why people and businesses choose to go open source. For some, it is because they think that it is where the market place is moving. For others it is because they think that a community will emerge around their effort, and then get free resources that improve the piece of software. Some think that their software will promptly be reviewed by professional programmer. Others may think that their system will become more secure. Etc. For Structured Dynamics the reason why we choose to go open source is somewhat different: ‘We perceived that by open sourcing our complete software stack we could bootstrap the company without any external investment.’”

Read more here.

Image: Courtesy Flickr/ Tawheed Manzoor

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