Tim,

For the past 2 years my company has been working on a software project that we had hoped to eventually sell commercially. Due to fact that both of our programmers left for better positions and software development is not my companies main focus we quit working on the project. I have convinced my company to let me release it to the OSS community.

Maybe this question should be directed to Eric Raymond, he seems to have become the De Facto spokes person for the OSS community. Basically I would just like some advice on how to go about releasing the program in the most effective manner. Without having any programmers to back me up my plans are to set up a site with forums and source code and hope to get the attention of a few programmers on the net.

The program we developed is called ActiveGuardian. It is a filtering internet proxy based on linux. The server was coded in C and the admin scripts were coded in perl. AG filters web pages based on sitelist, wordlist, and PICS rating system. We have installed it at multiple schools in the area and it works great.

I look forward to your insight.

Thanks Tim,

John Storlie
InCommand Interactive

You raise an interesting issue, which is coming up across the board. There are several things to consider:

1. There are doubtless millions of man-hours of useful code locked up in corporations. In many cases, code that is no longer strategic to the company in question could be put to use by someone else.

2. That being said, it's important to realize that you can't just throw a program over the wall and hope that it will be picked up. I've heard about a lot of companies imagining that if they just Open Source a program, it will magically be picked up by the world and improved. But in fact, the Open Source world, just like the commercial one, is awash in unused code. Existing projects tend to have their hands full with input to their own projects, without picking up someone else's.

   I'd hate to see companies concluding that the Open Source process doesn't work if they put some code out there and nobody comes.

   As a result, it's really important to identify who cares about the topic in question. If a commercial program already has a base of technical users (developers, not end users), the target is simple: Open Source the program to its community of existing users. If it's an end-user program, you have to find someone who's working with the same problem space, and see if they want to take it over. Eric Raymond talks about this process (and this obligation) to find a new maintainer in The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

3. Another important issue, if you want to create and energize your own user/developer community, is that you need tools for interaction, code management, bug tracking, and so on. One good place to get an overview of what you need is the article that Brian Behlendorf of the Apache Group wrote for our recent book Open Sources. This book consists of essays by leaders of many Open Source and other collaborative development projects. Over the next year, you can expect several additional books from O'Reilly about the tools and processes of collaborative development.

--Tim

Editor's Note: Simson Garfinkel is author and co-author of several O'Reilly books, including PGP: Pretty Good Privacy, Practical Unix Security and Stopping Spam.

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