Open letter to MainConcept at Mad Penguin
Friday, August 24th, 2007Matt Hartley at Mad Penguin writes:
This is an open letter to the creators of MainActor. MainConcept, I fully understand your need to better focus your efforts on your encoder business. But correct me if I ‘m wrong, is MainActor not the perfect vehicle for moving the MPEG encoder?
I would agree that supporting the application, MainActor, is likely more than you wish to support right now. But instead of writing it off, why not simply open source the code for this application, including its existing Deb and RPM packages, while using it to sell your Encoder products? Here, let me break this down for you.
MainActor + A Liberal Open Source License = Easy Distribution for Your Core Business Model.
Read the full story here.
An important consideration for MainConcept that I think Mr. Hartley overlooks is the amount of work it will take on their part to ensure that any source code they release does not include proprietary technology. What if they accidentally include code they wished to keep proprietary? Auditing the code would take some work. Further, MainActor was created by a team of people who in all likelihood feel a sense of pride in their work. Like giving away the family dog because little Billy’s allergic, they are not going to just hand it over to anyone. They’ll want to find a good home. What are the guarantees that if they do release the code, it won’t just languish with no developers attending to it? At least if they keep it, they can retain control.