On Monday 18 March 2002 11:49 pm, John Tapsell wrote:
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Being a uni student, I'm obviously very pleased and excited, but if I did this I would have to make it closed source,
Have the VCs explicitly said that?
They said that in business you need to find a way to protect your goods by 'black box'ing it.
and indeed actively protect it.
What if you made it time-delayed open source, like Ghostscript? Would they go for that?
I got mixed reactions about this - they said companies tend to look at a period of 1.5 years - so even if I told the companies I was going to open source it in 2 years time, they wouldn't care and it wouldn't affect their plans to buy it.
If people will still buy it despite it being open sourced down the road, then that's an argument in *favour* of time-delayed open source, surely...
Also my exit strategy is 3 years - I couldn't OS it before then - in the third year I'd be paying back close to several thousand pound a month in loans, so I daren't do anything to upset the cash flow during that time ;)
...except that 3 years later you won't have that product to sell; perhaps you'd be able to seel an updated, improved version -- or that might not be possible for your product.
But after that it would be fine. But then who knows where we'll be in 3 years...
Perhaps you could have it in oyur contract of sale that the product becomes open source when either thew company ceases trading, or ceases to actively update the product.