OSCON06: Taking a Closed Source Product Open

Neelan Choksi gave a talk at OSCON entitled "Lessons Learned in Taking a Closed Source Product Open" about BEA making Kodo (Java persistence APIs) an open source project. Choksi is the senior director of products at BEA. Why did he work at making Kodo open source? The users kept asking them to do it and BEA can make more by open sourcing it by selling support and add-ons. He had some good advice about the whole process. First, note that it is a one way process, once you go open source there is not turning back. Company leadership buy-in is a must, because you need your whole organizations support. Even though the project is open sourced it will still need management, marketing, documentation, and quality assurance testing. Good documentation is very important for an open source project, it helps make it easier for developers to decide if they want to join and where they can contribute. One goal is to reduce market costs by building a community around the product. To do this you need a really good evangelizer, someone who can hit the speaker circuit. Ironically it probably costs more initial to open source a close project than starting one from scratch. A lot of effort has to be devoted to getting the documentation up to a level that will help build a community. Make sure your support organization will be able to handle the increased load, especially if you offer some low cost support to get people to seriously try out the software. Lastly, don't expect results overnight, make sure your management understands that it will take at least a year or more to build up a community.