A Day in Paradise

Somehow, between all the anti pasta and PHP revelry in Italy, OSS Blog managed to get an interview with Tobias Schlitt. The interview covers PHP, Open Source, Ajax and surrounding technologies.

I don’t think I need to say this, but I LOVE Free Software. Companies like eZsystems, MySQL, RedHat and many more, show there is business model which can be both profitable and open.

In the interview with OSSBlog Toby states:

I think, that all software should be open nowadays. That sounds a bit radical at a first glance, but I have some valid reasons: Most software today does not invent any really new technique or concept. Software development mostly consists of taking parts from other software, putting those together and code a little bit around it. This concept aligns very well with the concept of open source. Another reason is, that the software market is changing (maybe because of open source or maybe the other way around). It is not the software itself, where the money comes from, but the services provided for it. The last reason is my personal geekness. I love to learn from other peoples code and I love to just change the code, when I need a different feature or fix a bug.

While I agree with the general concept, I disagree that totally free software is right for every business model.

Case in Point: As part of my code portfolio, I have a quantitative statistics engine which I developed for a client. This is a fairly specific peice of software designed for fund managers most of whom have around $100 million of assets under their management. The software package is written in PHP and is being used in over 30 client sites. It is also the core of a service which will be launching in the near future.

The entire package is written by me (although if I would have discovered PEAR::Math_Finance) I would have certainly used and contributed to that package. After the basic financial calculation class, I implement several hundred algorithms to create the core of the package. Some of the algorithms are freely available online, others needed a lot of offline (often maddening) research. Needless to say the implementation was a fair amount of work, and the intellectual property value of the final product is substantial.

My question is, why should I push for opening up the source? What financial gains would the company that invested in the development get? What benefit would it be to the open source community?

I can understand that if this were a conventional software application distributed using the GPL. I would then have legal means to ensure that the GPL is maintained, or I could use a dual licensing model to license the technology for commercial application. But none of these benefits come through in this case?

Should I just blindly push for the open sourcing of this library? Or is the non-distributed nature of web services where the GPL breaks down?