Here's our[1] take on it... Our entire company is built around F/OSS, including both code we've written from scratch, greenfield style[2]; code that we've written which is (based on|inspired by|links to) existing F/OSS packages; and code which is directly borrowed from other projects (in compliance with the license, of course).
So if our entire product suite is based around F/OSS, and given some public statements we've made[3], you might ask "is there anything you wouldn't open source"? And the answer, is "yes". There probably isn't a lot we would keep proprietary, but where we did, it would be internal tooling or software related to internal processes which we believe constitute (some or all of) our competitive advantage.
That said, even on internal tools, we are open (no pun intended) to open sourcing more stuff. I wrote a Grails based app a while back for managing competitive intelligence. The tool itself isn't anything particularly special but it's handy. The value we derive from it is the data we have loaded into our instance, not the tool itself. So there's a good chance we'll open source that eventually. In fact, it it weren't for lack of time to polish up the code a bit and otherwise do the "stuff" I'd like to do before releasing it, it would probably already be on GitHub.
Oh, and it needs a new name before we'd release it to the world. The (silly) internal name is FUCIT - Fogbeam Universal Competitive Intelligence Tool. :-) And we'll probably expand this to a more general "industry awareness" tool eventually, as opposed to being strictly about "competitive" intelligence as well.
From TFA:
The codebases of the most companies are made of business logic dominated repositories and tools/utilities built around them. Assuming that your company has a valuable business logic inventory, you should probably keep that code to yourself.
Yeah, that's about the size of it. A tool which embodies logic which is core to the business per-se, will stay proprietary. But generic tools, which confer no particular competitive advantage, are just as well open sourced.
So if our entire product suite is based around F/OSS, and given some public statements we've made[3], you might ask "is there anything you wouldn't open source"? And the answer, is "yes". There probably isn't a lot we would keep proprietary, but where we did, it would be internal tooling or software related to internal processes which we believe constitute (some or all of) our competitive advantage.
That said, even on internal tools, we are open (no pun intended) to open sourcing more stuff. I wrote a Grails based app a while back for managing competitive intelligence. The tool itself isn't anything particularly special but it's handy. The value we derive from it is the data we have loaded into our instance, not the tool itself. So there's a good chance we'll open source that eventually. In fact, it it weren't for lack of time to polish up the code a bit and otherwise do the "stuff" I'd like to do before releasing it, it would probably already be on GitHub.
Oh, and it needs a new name before we'd release it to the world. The (silly) internal name is FUCIT - Fogbeam Universal Competitive Intelligence Tool. :-) And we'll probably expand this to a more general "industry awareness" tool eventually, as opposed to being strictly about "competitive" intelligence as well.
From TFA:
The codebases of the most companies are made of business logic dominated repositories and tools/utilities built around them. Assuming that your company has a valuable business logic inventory, you should probably keep that code to yourself.
Yeah, that's about the size of it. A tool which embodies logic which is core to the business per-se, will stay proprietary. But generic tools, which confer no particular competitive advantage, are just as well open sourced.
[1]: http://www.fogbeam.com
[2]: https://github.com/Fogbeam
[3]: http://www.fogbeam.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-google-question-...