[racket] consulting and open source Racket enhancements

On 24/09/13 23:28, Neil Van Dyke wrote:
> Anyway, I'm thinking of starting a side business of developing 
> general-purpose Racket packages on demand -- modules that satisfy all 
> clients' requirements and are incidentally open-sourced. Perhaps with 
> some discount over normal rates in consideration of the package being 
> open-sourced.  Of course, separate from that, I'll continue to 
> open-source modules that I develop for my personal projects 
> ("http://www.neilvandyke.org/racket/").  Anyone have input?

I probably wouldn't offer a discount for open source as it muddies the 
waters and it can often make good business sense for a client to release 
a module as open-source.  By releasing a module in this way they 
increase the chances that it will be improved long after their initial 
investment has been made to create it.  In addition if more people are 
using it and have the chance to report bugs, they can have greater 
confidence in it.  If you are ever asked to improve an open-source 
module, it again can make sense for them to allow those improvements to 
be contributed back to the project as they will not have to maintain a 
private fork and merge in changes from the main project.

This all goes to lower their future costs and increase the potential 
speed, reliability, interoperability and features of their software.  
Which is almost definitely the major reason that companies such as 
Apple, twitter, facebook, google, et al release open-source code and 
contribute to it.

I hope that you manage to make a success of this venture, and in the 
process bring more great modules to Racket.

bfn


Lorry

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