TechWhale moves away from OpenSource
I have been reading with interest the letter of Alan Ranciato, President of TechWhale Solutions Inc. It looks like TechWhale was lurred into some sort of lala land where they thought that by dumping the code for their products, mass of users worldwide would work for free to enhance their BlueWhaleCRM product.
What we soon learned was that the mass of the OS community “hates� Microsoft based products
I’m sorry Alan, but I don’t exactly agree.
- There is no such “OS community” when you dump some product code. This was the job of TechWhale to actually builds a community around it and drive people to contribute. It takes time and effort. It’s no magic bullet. You need “marketing” effort, communication and you need to play by the rules.
- It certainly was a risky decision from a market point of view. Many opensource contributors run on either Windows, Linux or OS/X but mostly opensource projects are made to work for those platforms. Targeting only Windows users to develop for Windows in .NET is extremely risky to me.
I think this letter unfortunatly demonstrates clearly an error of analysis that many companies did and still do as of today, thinking that by dumping the code somewhere it will suddenly have a second life.
I have been only in the OpenSource for something like 5 years through The Apache Software Foundation, and all I can say, is that indeed contribution rate is generally very low and I would be surprised to hear that you can get more than 1 per 10000.
