Are there Negative Impact of opensource on commercial environment?
- by Lostsoul
I know this is not a good fit for Stack Overflow but wasn't sure if it was good for this site also so let me know if its not and I'll delete it.
I love programming for fun but my role in my company is not technical. I have always loved the hacker culture and have been trying to drive that openness within my company from day one.
My company has a very broad range of products and there are a few that are not strategic to us so I wanted to open source them (so we can focus on what makes us unique and open source the products that every firm has).
Our industry does not open source(we would be the first firm to try this) and the feedback I'm getting from my management team is either 1) we'll destroy the industry or 2) all competitive commercial firms will unite against us and we'll be wiped out either way. I disagreed on both points because I think transparency will only grow our industry and our firm (think of McDonalds/KFC sharing their recipe openly, people may copy you, competitors may target you, but customers also may feel more comfortable buying your product. The value add, I believe, is in the delivery and experience not in hoarding the recipe).
It's a big battle in my firm right now between the IT people who have seen the positive effects of sharing and the business people who think we'll be giving up everything (they prefer we sell parts we want to opensource, but in their defense this is standard when divesting something).
Our industry is very secretive and I don't want to put anyone(even my competitors employees) out of a job yet I don't want to protect inefficient people by not being open with everyone. Yet I've seen so many amazing technologies created in interesting ways just by giving people freedom to take apart code and put it back together. I'm interested in hearing people's thoughts(doesn't have to be to my specific situation, I'm looking for the general lessons). Its a very stressful decision(but one I feel I must make) because if we go the open source route then there will be no going back.
So what are your thoughts? Does open sourcing apply generally or is it only really applicable to software? Is it overall good for people in the industry and outside? I'm actually more interested in the negativeness effects(although positive are welcomed as well)
Update: Long story short, although code is involved this is not so much about code as it is more about the idea of open sourcing.
We are a mid sized quant hedge fund. We have some unique strategies but also have the standard long/short, arbitrage, global macro, etc.. funds.
We are keeping the unique funds we have but the other stuff that everyone else has we are considering open sourcing (We have put in years of work & millions of dollars into. Our funds is pretty popular and our performance is either in first or second quartile so I suspect there will be interest but I don't know to what extent).
The goal is not to get a community to work for us or anything, the goal is to let anyone who wants to tinker with it do so and create anything they want (it will not be part of our product line although I may unofficially allocate some our of staff's time to assist any community that grows). Although the code base is quite large, the value in this is the industry knowledge and approaches we have acquired (there are many books on artificial intelligence and quant trading but they are often years behind what's really going on as most firms forbid their staff from discussing what they are doing).
We are also considering after we move our clients out to let the software still run and output the resulting portfolios for free as well so people can at least see the results(as long as we have avail. infrastructure).
I think our main choices are, we can continue to fight for market share in a products that are becoming commoditized, we can shut the funds/products down(and keep the code but no one outside of our firm will ever learn from it) or we can open source it and let people do what they want.
By open sourcing it, my idea is that the talent pool in the industry will grow because right now most of our hires have the same background (CFA, MBA, similar school, same experience,etc.. because we can't spend time training people so the industry 'standardizes' most people and thus the firms themselves start to look/act similar) but this may allow us to identify talent that has never been in the industry before (if we put a GPU license then as people learn from what we did, we can learn from what they do as well and maybe apply it to other areas of our firm).
I see a lot of benefits but not many negatives while my peers at the company see the opposite.
