I agree that for a single developer, open sourcing a product can be very good. You get peer recognition and probably some job offers. But I bet those job offers come in from places that make closed source software.
For businesses, the risk associated with closed sourcing your app are finite and simple:
1) The people that want source code with their app won't buy it. As was said in the article "not that many people will even notice", so it's not a lot of people.
2) You lose out on _possibly_ getting some work done on your product for free.
It seems to me that there are more and larger risks associated with open sourcing your app:
1) Lower bar to entry for competitors.
2) Definitely losing sales to customers with IT departments that know how to compile source code.
3) Possibly losing control over your own creation.
4) Fragmentation - IMO Linux would be better and more popular if there weren't so many distributions.
> Definitely losing sales to customers with IT departments that know how to compile source code.
Quite possible, but I can say that I've gotten some of my best and most valuable feedback from these sorts of "customers". They don't pay me a cent, but they provide me with really good feature requests and bug reports.
Now you might argue that if the source was closed, I could get the feedback and the sale. Perhaps. But perhaps the savvy IT departments only install open source or freely available software.
For businesses, the risk associated with closed sourcing your app are finite and simple:
1) The people that want source code with their app won't buy it. As was said in the article "not that many people will even notice", so it's not a lot of people.
2) You lose out on _possibly_ getting some work done on your product for free.
It seems to me that there are more and larger risks associated with open sourcing your app:
1) Lower bar to entry for competitors. 2) Definitely losing sales to customers with IT departments that know how to compile source code. 3) Possibly losing control over your own creation. 4) Fragmentation - IMO Linux would be better and more popular if there weren't so many distributions.