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Going opensource

by mrbrown123
5 replies
I would love to hear of your experiences of going opensource with a product.

We opened a company and in the first five weeks took over $2000 USD.

We made a brave decision and went opensource with our base code. Expecting a reduction of sales and loss of profit.

As predicted are profits went to near zero

What did change was our traffic! increased by 500% and out product is now downloaded from our servers maybe 30 a day. Hotlinks exists all over the net now so maybe 100s of downloads a day now.

It's a exiting place to be- yet unnerving of the direction it will take us.

would love to hear of success stories and yes the bad ones too.
#opensource
  • Profile picture of the author keliix06
    I would assume you've done things like setup professional support contracts that enterprises can purchase, etc. to help drive some revenue?

    But going open source doesn't mean you have to give your software away, it just means everyone has access to the full source code. I believe what you meant to say is you've relicensed under something like the GPL. And to get technical you can still sell GPL software
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    • Profile picture of the author mrbrown123
      Originally Posted by keliix06 View Post

      I would assume you've done things like setup professional support contracts that enterprises can purchase, etc. to help drive some revenue?

      But going open source doesn't mean you have to give your software away, it just means everyone has access to the full source code. I believe what you meant to say is you've relicensed under something like the GPL. And to get technical you can still sell GPL software

      Yes, Absolutely we have licensed the product under opensource license. better explained, its GPL cc 3.0 unported license free to use for projects and personal work with giving reference to original developers.What we did is made the basic or in better language , the core of our softwares opensource So that people can develop and Use it in their own ways.
      It is meant for those people who have talent but no funds to buy a good script to work on it.

      We also encouraged custom development using our core by organizing competitions and reward deserving developers.

      Along side , we keep maintaining our commercial versions for those who dont actually want to custom code everything or want to save their time by paying for the Hard part i.e server side script writing.

      Originally Posted by Istvan Horvath View Post

      I am not sure I can follow the events described in your post...


      Why? Why would you expect a drop in profits?
      If I am on your sales page, how do I know that the product is open source code... that would prevent me from buying it?


      Hmm... If you have hotlinks to your DL page... it means you were foolish enough not to protect your DL page. What does that have to do with the code being opensource???

      Open source is not equal with "free" - as in free beer.
      It is equal with "free" - as in free speech.

      Maybe you can explain better what happened.
      when starting this project we did not visualize that we would actually end up selling php scripts at all.It was by flook that this happened. Our aim was to use very simple but efficient code with basic function to create a new viral combination of multiple API integration. it was a case of simply using several APis that could be cobimned into one great viral exchange using platforms like facebook , twitter etc. We actually came up with something really standard and converted it in sales. By sales here i mean good countable sales.


      We were amazed at the feedback about what we did.
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  • Profile picture of the author Tyrus Antas
    What software have you open sourced?
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  • Profile picture of the author Istvan Horvath
    I am not sure I can follow the events described in your post...

    Originally Posted by mrbrown123 View Post

    We made a brave decision and went opensource with our base code. Expecting a reduction of sales and loss of profit.
    Why? Why would you expect a drop in profits?
    If I am on your sales page, how do I know that the product is open source code... that would prevent me from buying it?

    Originally Posted by mrbrown123 View Post

    What did change was our traffic! increased by 500% and out product is now downloaded from our servers maybe 30 a day. Hotlinks exists all over the net now ...
    Hmm... If you have hotlinks to your DL page... it means you were foolish enough not to protect your DL page. What does that have to do with the code being opensource???

    Open source is not equal with "free" - as in free beer.
    It is equal with "free" - as in free speech.

    Maybe you can explain better what happened.
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  • Profile picture of the author Neil Morgan
    That's an interesting model.

    Actually, it's similar to giving away "free" stuff (whatever that may be) to build a base to work with then upselling them on the "professional" version and/or services.

    It's a numbers game, after all and this is a well tried way to make the numbers work for you.

    Got me thinking, that did.

    Cheers,

    Neil
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