How do you convince an entrepreneur to go opensource?
So, a while back, I became a council member at the Technopreneurs Association of Malaysia (TeAM). My focus is on open source and open standards.
I would like to get more entrepreneurs building their products on opensource. I want them to harness open standards, and expose APIs so others can build cool stuff around it. I want to see TeAM help create more Malaysian tech success stories.
As an aside, I found FOSS FAQ, and decided to post a question there: How do you convince an entrepreneur to go opensource?.
Seems like a silly question. I mean, VC’s like Guy Kawasaki like you to use cheap, and highly available tools, and opensource fits that bill. But nowadays, proprietary vendors have also upped the game – they also provide cheap (free for a time period) tools. So how do you get entrepreneurs going OSS for their products? What’s your pitch to them?
My pitch would be the higher quality of the software. More eyes can find more bugs and the transparency allows for better quality products.
But that alone doesn't work against the marketing arms that proprietary providers can provide. Remember how, ages ago, proprietary providers have also pitched saying that because the source is available, its more insecure? ;-)