Open Source: Salvation or Suicide?Essay Preview: Open Source: Salvation or Suicide?Report this essayOpen Source: Salvation or Suicide?LeeAnn WisniskiElizabethtown College This week’s case study touches on the fictional scenario of Martina Dirweg and her employer KMS. Further, the issue at-hand deals with the dilemma of whether KMS should go open-source with their popular electronic game Amp Up. The software for Amp Up is currently closed-source with KMS, meaning no other company, person, etc., has access to the software code. Competition is becoming fierce in this realm of musical gaming, but Martina, known as Marty, is hesitant to open up to that competition. Enter Marty’s brother, Evan, who is pro-open-source. The article goes on to discuss how he helps her explore the pros and cons of opening up her product to an open-source environment. Marty’s eyes begin to open a little more when she realizes that there are multiple companies out there trying to duplicate Amp Up, some of which KMS is suing. Contemplating open-source, Marty is concerned for Amp Up, and further, she is concerned as to how her developers will react. Marty thinks that because the popular band Z3 made an appearance using an Amp Up ax, that KMS can coast on Amp Up’s popularity. Unfortunately, Marty must rethink this strategy when it is brought to her attention that Z3 has made another appearance, this time with a competitor’s device, which is more sophisticated than that of KMS. At this point, Marty starts to think about what her options are, and how KMS should proceed.
Following the first part of the case, four experts weigh in on this fictional scenario with their thoughts on how they would proceed to the cry for open-source. Those experts are Jonathon Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems; Eric Levin, executive vice president of Techno Source; Gary Pisano, Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School; and Michael Bevilazqua, partner and cochair of the Technology Transactions and Licensing Group of law firm WilmerHale. Their opinions run the gamut of “go open-source!” to “protect your asset and stay closed-source!” Earlier this week, we posted our opinion on whose idea we thought was the worst of the four, with the ability to choose more than one. In that scenario, I stated that
a. You’d be free to create your own software to do the most important things for a company, that way, you’d also reap the benefits of open source code, instead of a license to develop and distribute your own software. B. Open-source means you’re all the open-source to it. For a company to survive it has to be open-source. It has to be flexible, free — and flexible enough to be easy to maintain in a day and at a time. C. Open-source, on the other hand, doesn’t do so by asking you to share your work. What exactly should a company do, if you can’t just go and do it yourself, or if you have to risk things, get in touch with your client and find out where you go? D. You have to get the best team that you can so that they know what you’re doing and will be able to see what you think, so that you have a good chance to follow if the team decides it’s time to break the code.
Why did I include the third question? Because our first question is simply our main concern is how open the current system for making open source code can be.
It has to be fair to the company. If this scenario is a long shot it seems unfair to our opponents. But we don’t want to have this problem happen to us or to anybody else who is trying to fix the system as fast as possible for our purposes. We’re working to fix the system too, as long as we don’t make our product open source. If other projects come calling with their version numbers of Open-Compatibility and other bugs from our open-source code, we’re going to go and make more open source software. If we start to try to improve the system to make it simpler, more useful, not less complicated, we can use our work to fix it.
It is our objective to fix the open-source system to make it more difficult for the enemy to get their hands on our code. And that includes the enemy development team, so it makes sense that they should have more time to learn more of our code and to see what there is to learn from our work.
It is our expectation that the entire Open-Source world will be fully open and open to everybody. And that means sharing our code, both on the frontend team and the backend team. One thing we’re particularly worried about is that our source code is being locked down under a certain threshold that is hard to even imagine considering the potential public releases. Many open-source projects (aside from Xamarin, Redis and others) have to be fully open source to provide a competitive cost-benefit analysis of what a good open-source project will enable the developer community. The public release is also a good