Why Open Source?

Last week was the first week we have been “open source” and we have been very pleased with the responses from the community. Last Monday, I announced that we would open source VivoSocial, a social networking package, built on top of DotNetNuke 5.2.2 framework. Due to issues with Subversion and CodePlex, it wasn’t until Wednesday that I actually published the project at social.codeplex.com. Since then, we have received lots of questions, but the one that is most common is why we decided to go open source.

Some of the questions were humorous, asking:

How can all of these modules be free? What is the catch?
How long will they be free?
Why are they free?

Here is my response…

Yes, they are all free, no charge, no cost, zero dollars, etc. They are all released under the MIT license, which is the same as the DotNetNuke license. You are “free” to do whatever you want with them, as long as you leave our license information in each file. They will continue to be free forever, as they are open source.

So, why open source? When I discussed this with the other guys at VivoWare, they too thought I was crazy. Why would we give away all of the source code we have worked so hard on for so long? The reason is simple. We have never made any real money selling modules on our site, nor from SnowCovered with their 25% commission fee. However, most of our revenue has always been from customizations and support. So, by giving away our modules, we will have put our code in more hands than ever before, and with that comes request for more customizations and paid support. It’s that simple.