Open-source your product | Hacker News Reader

Open-source your product

news.ycombinator.com

29 pointspalish13 comments

The product is valuable because of the thousands of small decisions you made as you were developing the product. The source code is just the manifestation of those decisions. In other words, the product is valuable because of its design, not because of the source code that describes that design. Just because someone has access to a product's source code doesn't mean they can make valuable decisions about it.

That's the key insight of Peter Naur's classic article "Programming as Theory Building". (That's Naur as in BNF.) He starts with the question: why is it that code, even well-written code and even well-documented code (rare as that is) isn't sufficient to allow a new team to effectively take over development of a system? His answer: the program is not the source code, but rather a shared mental construct (he says "theory", you said "design") that lives in the minds of the people who made it. Source code is a textual representation of that construct, but it's a lossy one. So if you lose all the original people, it's hard to reconstruct the program.

Edit: I posted the article to YC ages ago but that link is broken. You can get it here: http://web.archive.org/web/20080209152318/http://www.zafar.s...

Fascinating! Thanks for making the connection.

I write a small Mac shareware program. Perhaps the suggestion isn't aimed at me, but if I open sourced the whole thing, one person with enough knowledge could compile it and distribute to everyone else for free. I have little doubt that sales would be hit very hard.

Web apps might be a bit more suited to it once they have momentum and users. If Facebook released its source code (security issues aside), it wouldn't make a difference to them -- people join and use Facebook because all of their friends use it, and that's got nothing to do with the source code.

One thing you didn't really address is what the benefits of open-sourcing your product would be. Unless I missed something, the discussion so far has only been about the (real or imagined) downside.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=364703

Thanks.

I'm confused - are we meant to comment on this or the comment it links to?

Not sure why this was posted as a top level story. Make it into an Ask HN or something at least.

I posted it as a toplevel so that the idea would gain more exposure. (I certainly don't care about karma -- it's meaningless.) I'm genuinely interested to know what people think about the idea of open-sourcing their product at launch. And the more people who give their opinion, the better.

Feel free to leave a comment here or in the other thread.

I find it interesting I'm slowly developing a love of getting karma. It seems to come from if I'm getting it, someone is reading my comments, and there may be interesting replies to read....

Well I'm probably just being a stick in the mud - but that seems like a bad idea. If everyone posted comments as threads the top page would be a cluttered mess.

Only if everyone made insightful or otherwise useful comments, which the community then upvoted. That would be a good thing, not a bad thing.

Also please consider that I spent a good deal of time on crafting my reply, in the spirit of hopefully helping someone (and not to read myself talk). Also, my reply was about a totally different topic than the thread it was inspired by.

Your post definitely was worth submitting as a topic, agreed. I don't think that it's worthwhile too often, but in this case it's thoughtful, well-written, and interesting. Better than most blog posts I've read recently.

I had a comment of mine submitted as a post a while back, and I was very grateful - I thought the comment was worth a post. If comments are valuable stories, then, I don't see a problem at all with your self-submitting this one.

Only think of this:

Our personal thinking is never 'Open Source', we always keep some more-or-less decisive part secret (read: protected!), and this for good reasons.

To open-source everything would be very similar to showing yourself naked everywhere...

But I agree that commonly used libraries should be open source (the ones I use are all open source).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com