Business potential of open vs. proprietary web technologies

[ondrej]

Hi, I need your advice.

I am a web developer/programmer for some time now. I work in a small company with a wonderful team of very nice people. We specialize in developing web/server applications for middle-sized companies in PHP/Java and now our company is transforming into rails-oriented developing. It's a good and challenging job, but here's my dilema:

I'd like to create my own portfolio of B2B products for web but I'm not sure which "path" to take. I see a path of open web technologies such as PHP, rails, maybe Adobe AIR and proprietary web technologies such as ASP.NET or Silverlight. From my experience I think the open technologies are much for people who like to play, discover, who enjoy developing/programming most and are not concerned by business too much, who "think open-source" not business (or who develope bespoke and don't care about this at all), while the proprietary technologies are more business based.

It is especially difficult to provide a product in PHP, JavaScript or such because you also provide source code (I know about encoders and "code-mixers" but they are only replacements). From this point of view, releasing an ASP.NET product is much more safe and it is INTENDED for B2B. This decision is complicated for me because although ASP.NET would be a better choice for business, I sympathize more with open technologies and I also like to discover and play.. but not too much. I see vBulletin as an example of connection between open technology and business but it's still PHP and PHP is considered to be quite a crap, for beginners, PHP is definetely not seen as a serious business environment... So here I am stuck.


I'd be grateful for any of your insights or advices..


Thanks, ondrej

[tobyhede]

You could host the apps yourself, rather than distribute them ...

Companies like 37Signals do this and have great success.

It depends on your exact target market (there are business and the are Businesses).

If allowing companies to install your applications on a server is of critical importance, you can charge for it. We use Confluence and Jira, which cost several thousand dollars, and you can get access to the source code with the license. Most companies are very concerned with making sure software is licensed correctly - software is a legitimate business expense, and the penalties for piracy are sever enough to make the risk not worth it.

As to PHP or .Net, I don't think it really matters from a technical perspective. ASP.Net is more expensive to host, because of Windows and SQL Server licensing, so it depends on your target market.

Lot's of organisations use PHP for business applications. I think the reason there are more open PHP apps simply comes down to the Microsoft licensing costs.

[1000feet]

You'll need to understand the customers in your specific markets better to get an answer. For a small company it's easiest to use reasonably-priced hosted services like 37signals since they don't need someone to run the software or the servers. Larger companies have administrators, and very large ones have their own programmers. When you know who you're aiming for, it's easy to tell which option is more important. You can always sell the application as a self-installed package and a managed service at the same time, so customers have a choice of how much they want to be involved.

If you're creating a major application, a company with enough administrators can set up the servers of your choice to install the application themselves; otherwise it might have to run on whatever is available. A large majority of webservers are running linux which rules out ASP.Net, but it is still used by many companies. Of course, there's also Java which runs on windows and linux (depending on the server it's designed for). With enough time you could do like Fog Creek Software (of Joel On Software fame) and create a program to generate ASP files from PHP code or both from your own language.

Despite the fact that many people write bad code in PHP and it may not be as "business-oriented" as ASP, if you're most comfortable with it that can still be the best choice. As long as you know what's important you can write clean code and work around the shortcomings - it's most dangerous for people who aren't aware of the problems. You should test the things that are essential to you however, since some areas (like unicode support) may not work as well as you expect.

If you allow people to run their own servers, I wouldn't say that including the source code with the application is a bad thing. Sure, someone could set it up for their friend with a smaller business that isn't ready to pay the full price, but that's a comparatively small risk that's usually outweighed by the advantages of making it much easier to work with the application and allowing customers to change it. With low-end PHP scripts there's typically one encrypted file that does license management, so most of the code is available but it's not too easy to make it run without buying it.

[Iksander]

Python is superior to any of those languages you mentioned (exception being Ruby, since it is so similar).

I am of the 'make it all open source' crowd, you could still charge for a download license and subsequent upgrade licenses.

ExpressionEngine is a commercial product, but, they don't obfuscate their code - yet, it is a very successful business.

The upside to releasing your code, even if customers pay for a license - means you will get all those eyes and hands (probably alot being developers) looking at your code and improving it, providing patches, noticing bugs. That is a very strong upside to opensource that many companies actually seem to fear.

[Minsc]

You could use CGI with C++. (if you want to use an open-source programming language to write something that you don't need to provide code for, not sure if that's what you want)

[ExploringTheMatrix]

Zend offers a product called ZendGuard that will encrypt PHP files and prevent them from running unless a license file is present. You might want to give that a shot.

I have never been a big fan of encryption. I tend to figure that most businesses are not that interested in pirating software and if you include even a trivial (but not obnoxious) copy protection mechanism, they will pay for the software rather than editing the source code to get the program for free.

Remember that even with closed source programs, people can still send copies to their friends, create key generators, and so forth. Just because the source code is available doesn't mean you can't stop people from posting the code to the web.