No Hard and Fast Rules for When to Make an App Open Source

telecommatt | June 30, 2008

This article raises a valuable question. At what point is it better for the application to keep the source closed? I think that the answer is in the type of community the application generates around itself. This is regardless of the size of the app or the audience. You can’t measure the size of the user base and say, “Well, it’s time to go open source.” Instead, you have to look at the momentum within the community, however small that community may be.

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Those are just a handful of examples of apps going open source, but there are many more. Of course, this isn’t to ignore the fact that Sourceforge does quite well, it’s just to raise the question - does open sourcing a niche web app really encourage more development? When the community is so small, if the creator doesn’t continue to work on the app, how does the app really fare? And has a favorite app of yours ever been abandoned?