Older blog entries for larsu (starting at number 2)

In my quest to convince the Pointy Haired Bosses that open sourcing our new accounting app is a good thing, I came across an inportant discovery. I don't need to estimate the amount of support revenue that the GPL'd product will bring in. For GPL'ing the software to increase revenue, it just needs to bring in more support dollars than you will lose in licensing fees. Given that we've always went after a niche market, this is almost a certainty.

If anyone wants it, here is a great paper by Paul Everitt of Digital Creations (Zope) about why they open-sourced their product. It's a wonderful paper that makes a very strong business case... I'm surprised I hadn't come across it before.

Good news... the commercial web based accounting product I've been working on may get released under the GPL instead. I wish I had some idea of the ratio of downloads/support contracts bought for other open source products. I've got a rough estimate of downloads expected... but converting it to a revenue dollar amount just isn't happening.

This could very well be a killer app... I'm all sorts of excited about the possibility of seeing it go GPL.

I'm hard at work on a commercial PHP/MySQL accounting project for my day job, so I haven't spent much time developing for CCC in the last few months. I would like to thank everyone who has contributed, either by using the software or by supplying language or db translations.