I don’t think the traditional forms of “open source” would work for Xojo, and I do not advocate they provide everything for free. I merely described what I would like to see in a form that I think could be beneficial to Xojo, even including a new licensing option / revenue stream.
I’ve worked at a company where source licenses were frequently held for technical reasons.
It was
- troublesome to negotiate (usually 6 mos)
- very expensive (some were as much as 10 times the original license cost depending on product - some were 5 - 10 million annually)
- audited aggressively in case we leaked it
- and bug reporting was an enormous pain in the butt as we had to set up a machine, install the unaltered sources then verify if the bug was still there (basically to prove the bug was not something WE did) and the vendor then had to do the same thing on their end
before they would accept the bug as being in their code
It let us accomplish decent integration with their software & some we had custom written BUT it was very costly in many ways
Oh - and we had NO rights to alter their code & use it
THAT was discussed as part of the licensing & would have increased the cost by another 10x
We didn’t need that
I’ve never understood why that question is so often asked. Perhaps I’m once again making a fool of myself by saying something completely wrong, it’s been always quite obvious to me that the egg came first. Birds evolved from dinosaurs and dinosaurs laid eggs. There were dinosaurs before chickens because there were dinosaurs before birds - therefore the egg came first. By the way, I don’t mean to attack you Mike. I’m attacking the question itself.
I don’t think that Xojo should be open source, but I think that it should have a command-line interface so that people can create other IDEs when they want to. Maybe Xojo Inc won’t do this for some reason but I think if other people were worrying about making an IDE it’d free up Xojo Inc to focus on making Xojo itself better: 64bit, upgrading to .NET, etc…
Many of the features of Xojo are so tied into the IDE, I would imagine that separating the two would be nearly impossible. For instance, you would never be able to do profiling, as it’s a combination of compiler, framework, debugger and IDE.
I assumed this would be the #1 reason for not being able to do open source (or shared source, or source available, or whatever we want to call it) for parts of Xojo. The general consensus from the people who know is that it’s not worth Xojo’s time to set up and manage Open/Shared/Available Source for Xojo, which answers my original question.
People pay for support and for legitimacy (a huge amount of that comes from just being OSS). Trust from malicious code is also a big reason users pay. Especially when creating solutions for corporate clients. Premium extensions and exclusive availability go a long long long way too.
It boils down to if Xojo wants to own all of a small 7 centimeter pie or “just a slice” of a pie the size of New York city.
[quote=51363:@Stephen Carroll]It boils down to if Xojo wants to own all of a small 7 centimeter pie or “just a slice” of a pie the size of New York city.
[/quote]
Shark status: jumped.
The OSS model doesn’t keep users from working in their best interest. It simply makes it more efficient. There is a reason why companies like Red Hat, Ubuntu, WordPress and GitHub are popular. One doesn’t get to be a $1 billion dollar company without so much as a secretary …
Agreed. Keep in mind that open sourcing says nothing about giving up one’s other copyrights to source. This topic is based on the suggestion that an open source agreement be issued to accelerate development and feature requests. It doesn’t prevent the holder from profit, enhancement or even binds the original author to having follow said “copyleft”. The author has the advantage of copyrighting that which they own.
Thoughts on making open source ?
Stephen, I am really most interested in the pizza analogy. Presumably, you have hands on experience with using open source to make billion dollar pizzas the size of Manhattan. There is just one piece I see missing from your business case here, and that is a “step 3”:
- ???
Well, not “billion dollar”, I’m no Matt or Linus. Hundred of thousands yeah, … I’ll let you know what year we get a million 
Under the OSS model, not only do bugs get fixed and addressed faster (the philosophy is release early, release often), but the profit model is still the same as it is with closed source: you earn it by providing goods and services.
The latter is a profitable point as said services can be fire walled and while open source, often proprietary. The most popular OSS license is GPL and under its terms one doesn’t have to release any code that runs as a service on your own servers.
But for the most part, any goods and services with “trust” is the biggest model. People are more likely to pay for support and availability from the actual maintainers rather then a knockoff (i.e. “Boris Wang Smith’s Funtime Code Now”).
The Freemium model that Xojo implements now is a step in the right direction. OSS is just more infectious because of the faster feedback loop for bugs, fixes, features, and availability.
You haven’t established that this would occur for Xojo. I can make a very strong argument citing history of specific bugs in Feedback that it would have precisely the opposite effect.
A link to your project would be appreciated, so that we can all decide for ourselves whether you’re mixing apples and oranges here. I have a hunch that you are.
ServerPress.com. We’re relaunching a new site this year. Please cite the feedback issues. Would like to know more.
Cool, where is the source code for DesktopServer Premium? Couldn’t find it. I was looking forward to fixing bugs in your product and thinking about buying professional services later, maybe, well not really. But the bugs could be fixed faster if you practiced what you preach for other people’s products. No?
This feedback case is a perfect example of what I’m talking about:
<https://xojo.com/issue/31056>
No way this gets fixed unless two people who are getting paid to be interested in this bug go back and forth for a couple weeks and eventually figure it out. The people affected by it were doing something where I could easily have said, “hey go rewrite your app and don’t do this thing” instead of figuring out what my customers were doing and pushing the issue. And that leads me to the real point about open source. The bug fixing part works for you if you have the skills to dig in on a particular bug. Few here do. The ones who do get generally get paid for stuff like this. Having a company that they pay to maintain and set direction for a product they depend on is better than having that product at the whim of whoever feels like contributing.
I do practice what I preach. Sorry Brad, apparently you don’t understand how GPL works! This is probably the root of the problem. Please read the GPL license, obtain the source code and compile away. In fact, our next (currently unreleased version is not even better, but will be on GitHub to boot) 
I think you do a disservice by underestimating the capabilities of your users. However, (and more importantly) you do realize that open source does not, in any way inhibit the authors from fixing and charging for obtaining said fixes?
Xojo does not make their money on services or consulting. They make their money selling licenses to build with the IDE. By open sourcing the IDE, they would lose their current source of income. Going open source would completely change their business model a prospect no company wants to do unless forced.
Apparently I don’t know how GPL or open source works. I want the source code for DesktopServer Premium. I’ve scoured your site and can’t seem to find it except an invitation to “buy” a membership. No pricing information unless I click through. Even on the “buy” page, no mention of the source code. I don’t get how that helps me fix all your bugs.
It’s funny, Stephen. Way back in the day when I first read Cathedral and the Bazaar, the take-away for me was that for an open source project to be successful over the long haul, you probably have to underestimate the capabilities of all but a trusted few contributors for the core product. So then you have the problem of making it worth their while to basically have a full time job working on your product. Traditionally, that’s done with payment, but money has to come from somewhere. Absent a benefactor (there are OSS products that have one) or a sponsor (there are OSS products that have them), the common belief is that you sell “support”. Most OSS “advocates” I’ve run into just give some variation of your pizza analogy without considering trade-offs or nuance involved with actual open source projects.
Tell me Stephen, why I would ever pay you for support when you had an opportunity to just provide me with a link to your product’s source code, and you just obfuscated? Just handling the question might have earned you some business. Or maybe it doesn’t. Maybe I download your source, compile, use the product for free, fix your bugs, maybe share the fixes with you, and eventually, maybe buy support. Or not.
What makes you think the code is obfuscated when you didn’t bother to obtain it? Download the software, read the GPL, obtain the source and compile away. Did you know you can do this without having to purchase anything?
The problem here is finding the “right amount of openness”. No one is asking Xojo to eliminate their profit margin (again, I’m stressing the opposite). We’ve already seen advancements in Xojo’s leveraging of OSS through the inclusion of making things native objects such as JSON, Webkit, etc. The “Freemium” model now is heaps better for it’s success than it was prior (though I haven’t seen any sales data -it’s true that this is speculation).
Also speculation: if everyone was using their GPL (not MIT licensed) IDE under the open source model, what would inhibit them from purchasing their CLI compiler? What would inhibit them to making the IDE better? Do you honestly think Xojo would lose their defecto status for… Xojo? Trademarks and copyright on material (whether user contributed or not) do not fall under GPL. GPL only covers source code. It has nothing to do with documentation, Xojo’s branding, or their other copyrights.
But I see your points (though they sound like fear a.k.a. misunderstanding to me). Again, the argument for making parts of (such as the IDE) OSS is to be make Xojo more successful, NOT less.
Can we put a pin in this topic?
Were almost through re-re-rehashing the monthly IDE sucks topic and I expect we are due to re-re-re-re-re-revisit the XOJO has too many bugs issue next month. Then its time to re-re-re-rehash the I hate the rapid release model subject. I figure that means well be re-re-re-rehashing this again next March.
XOJO has made it clear they arent going to open source their product. Having this discussion pop up every few months serves no purpose in the XOJO forum.