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Comment by userAW | Hacker News Reader

Thanks for your comment...and to all the others on this thread for the help. The reason we like Open Source is NOT because we don't want to fish out $300 for a CMS.

It's because effective Open Source projects have a large and robust community behind them, which means that:

1. They're not dropping out when the product becomes less profitable...if some drop out, others take over and

2. There are many people looking at the code and fixing bugs.

So that's why we'd prefer an Open Source product. But like I said, we are considering Craft.

Thanks.

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> 1. They're not dropping out when the product becomes less profitable...if some drop out, others take over

I mentioned we’re open to moving to FOSS if we can create a business model that supports it. I should also say that, if worst comes to worst and we have to shut off the lights, one of two things will happen: either we will sell Craft to one of the thousands of companies with a vested interest in the product, whom we strongly feel is capable of continuing to move it forward, or we’d give Craft a GPL or MIT license, making it FOSS. There is no scenario where we would just drop it and pretend it never existed. Even if we wanted to do that, it would ruin our professional careers and probably result in a few lawsuits, so no thanks! :)

> 2. There are many people looking at the code and fixing bugs.

We recommend that plugin developers familiarize themselves with Craft’s codebase, because it’s the best place to find examples of how to do things when developing plugins. As a result, we’ve received hundreds of bug fixes from the community (including suggested code fixes). So this is definitely not an exclusive benefit to FOSS software.

This may be a bit hard to test so I ask this more out of curiosity:

Do you feel there is more stability for businesses that have a stake in supporting popular open source projects than businesses that have proprietary software products?

Alternatively, do you feel that the number of abandoned or failed open source projects have a significant distinction from the number of abandoned or failed proprietary software projects?

I'd love to see some research on the topic, as while the classification of something being open source or not opens source has legal implications as to how it can be used and the type of community it attracts, does it really make a meaningful contribution to whether the group of projects or companies involved succeed or fail?

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