[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Are Open Source Projects Products?
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Ask HN: Are Open Source Projects Products?
I would like to know if Open Source Projects can or should be
considered Products.
Author : richardjennings
Score : 4 points
Date : 2024-09-11 20:39 UTC (2 hours ago)
| readyplayernull wrote:
| Yes.
| zizee wrote:
| Depends on what your definition of a product is? My head cannon
| says the majority of open source projects are products, as they
| are published to be consumed/used by others.
| asadotzler wrote:
| I worked on the original "open source project" for years,
| starting in 1998.
|
| Netscape created Mozilla as the first open source project and it
| was meant to be just that, a project. Netscape would lead and
| contribute to that project to harness the "net community" to
| improve the code and then they would package it up, brand it, and
| advertise it as an end user product.
|
| The project was Mozilla and the product was Netscape.
|
| Along the way it became clear the project was in a better
| position to build a compelling product than Netscape, and so the
| project created teams to do that and eventually spun out of
| Netscape as the independent Mozilla Foundation where I was the
| first product manager, having been before a project manager.
|
| The Mozilla application suite was actually a R&D product, a
| functional application minus the easy packaging, proper branding,
| and marketing of something more polished. As soon as the project
| was no longer dependent on Netscape for the bulk of its work
| effort, that R&D product transformed into a genuine product and
| Firefox 1.0 came soon after as our first, from the start,
| project+product.
| suprjami wrote:
| They can be, even unexpectedly.
|
| My very first open source project was an initscript to run a
| headless Minecraft server. This was pre-systemd running on CentOS
| 6. I was just running the machine for a friend and thought others
| might find the script useful so I put it on GitHub. It did
| backups and other stuff too.
|
| I had two Minecraft hosting companies contact me to ask if they
| could use it in their commercial product.
|
| I said of course, the script is GPL, you can do what you like. If
| you have any problems your patches are welcome but I'm not your
| free tech support. (I said it a bit more politely than that)
|
| Once your stuff is out there it's not your decision. There are
| open source projects suited to becoming products, and there are
| projects which really should never or could never become
| products.
| djaouen wrote:
| No.
| ThinkBeat wrote:
| No. Open source projects are not automatically products.
|
| Webster says: Product: Something (such as a service) that is
| marketed or sold as a commodity.
|
| For me, a product is something one creates due to demand or
| expected demand that can be marketed and sold.
|
| An open-source project can be made simply for the joy of doing it
| without any stress about demand, marketing or anything else. Like
| going for for a walk, or a gme of chess,
|
| But an open-source project can also be started and created to
| scratch and itch, that may become interesting for others perhaps
| becoming a product.
|
| And it can be created to fill a targetted demand as an
| intentional product.
|
| Here on Hackernews nearly all open-source projects are products
| and exist in the hope of fame and/or money.
|
| But many of us have projects that are just for fun, Like the
| compulsion to build your cms and your own static site generator
| and everything in between and preferably a programming language
| and perhaps an editor.
|
| Though all of those could become a product in some universe.
|
| I am certainly not going to share my craptacular ssg.
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