[consulting] Is this list dead?

[Boris Mann]

On 3/19/07, Michael Haggerty <mhaggerty at trellon.com> wrote:

> Haven't seen much activity on this list for a while. Is this list dead, or
> are we all just very busy?

It's low traffic, not dead. YMMV :P

>
> An interesting story: without naming names, a friend of mine is starting a
> business. He is developing a platform that will use Drupal as the framework
> to deliver a specialized service and putting a lot of work into it. Part of
> his hook is that he will not be open sourcing some of the custom modules
> which are part of the platform in order to maintain a competitive advantage
> (i.e., if someone else wants to get into this market, they would have to
> build something themselves).

If it's a product that he's delivering (i.e. giving a copy of to some
external company in a non-work-for-hire mode), then the modules must
be open sourced (probably, depending on your interpretation of
"modules" in the GPL context)

If it's a hosted service, he can do whatever he wants.

If the modules are open source, but require an upstream service to
connect to in order to function, that's another way to protect a
business model (but someone could still reverse engineer the upstream
service and build that).

Getting into the market by having to build something yourself is not
particularly difficult. All software, especially when visible to
interact with, can likely be cloned pretty easily. It's all just time
and money and if the market is attractive enough...it will happen.

-- 
Boris Mann
Skype borismann
http://www.bryght.com