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Comment by _stephan | Hacker News Reader

I find this decision very intriguing from a business perspective. Thanks for elaborating on the reasons in the blog post.

By completely open sourcing your only software product with a liberal license you seem to be turning a software (product) company into a software consultancy, is that a fair assessment?

Do you think the market conditions that lead you to this decision are very specific to GPU computing, or would you expect similar conditions in the more general scientific computing/HPC market? Would you say that it's generally simpler to earn money by doing specialized consulting than by selling technical software libraries, even though the former is less "scalable"?

If you're earning all the money with consulting and support, how do you allocate ressources to the further development of the library? Do your software engineers enjoy working on your company's product the same as working on client projects?

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Yes, our primary method of making money will be through open source monetization strategies. I wrote thoughts on this here: http://notonlyluck.com/2014/01/16/monetizing-open-source-pro...

I bet the market conditions that led to this are broader than just GPU computing. I think it would more generally apply to any middleware business. But it is certainly more palatable for people in scientific computing and HPC to use something free and later pay for support and services and addons. Once people start really relying on the free thing, that reliance can be monetized. In this sense, it is more "scalable" to have an open source product which is readily adoptable by early users than to attempt to sell a product to buyers that have not yet started to rely upon it and have a good distance to go before reliance sets in. This is not SaaS and never will be, haha.

Allocation of future resources is something that we have considered a lot. I wrote before about opportunity costs associated with an open source business model: http://notonlyluck.com/2014/08/13/opportunity-costs-required...

We just open sourced today, but our plan is to treat the open source product the same as we have always treated it even when it was proprietary.

Great questions! Hit me up on Twitter @melonakos. Would be good to connect more with you, especially if you are going to SC'14 next week.

Thanks a lot for your reply and for providing links to your previous blog entries! I wish you good luck and hope the economics will continue to work out for you.

I do think that libraries should be distributed as open source, but I'm also hoping that at least in certain areas there is a way to commercially develop them as a product business. Provocatively speaking, if software "eats the world", then libraries are too important to just be developed as a by-product of some other ventures or in support of a platform/eco system.

Personally I'm planning on releasing a library under a GPL + commercial dual licensing scheme and later on another library under a non-commercial (incl. academic and government research) + commercial dual license. We'll see how that works out.

I can not answer the other questions, so I'll let John handle that part. I can answer this:

> If you're earning all the money with consulting and support, how do you allocate ressources to the further development of the library? Do your software engineers enjoy working on your company's product the same as working on client projects?

This is a question we have debated a lot internally. The shortest answer is that our experience building the product bring in the customers. The customer requirements can drive further development of the product.

Choosing the appropriate open source license (BSD-3 clause in this case), helps us reuse a lot of our code in a wide variety of situations.

> Choosing the appropriate open source license (BSD-3 clause in this case), helps us reuse a lot of our code in a wide variety of situations.

If I understand it correctly, since you wrote the code and own the rights, you can do this regardless of the license you chose; e.g., you could have done an AGPL-3 release to the public, and continue giving license-to-use-and-modify-but-not-release to customers.

Am I misunderstanding?

You are technically right, but in my experience a few companies either do not understand this or do not want to risk it for legal reasons.

BSD 3-clause on the other hand is very easy to understand and is permissive off the bat.

Another company that made this transition a while ago is Oberon Microsystems, who open-sourced their main product with a very liberal license.

Thanks for the info!

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