Xamarin 3 was released last week with a great new addition: Xamarin.Forms . This triggered our attention because we’ve been using such a system for a couple of years now. We’ve developed it by ourselves and used it for a bunch of projects.
We’ve been looking for a way to make this project open source but we didn’t manage to convince the management. They believe we should not make it open source because we won’t win anything with it and all that will happen is that the competition will be able to build apps quicker with our library. We believe open sourcing our library will make the world a better place and that it will make our library much more stable and complete.
So my question to all you people out there: How can we convince the management to open source our library?
5
Let’s assume you open source this project and your competition starts to use it and they save time creating apps which makes them equally attractive to customers.
If your company isn’t marketing, selling or making a counter-proposal to this client, you’ll never win the account, but there is a chance your competition wouldn’t win it without your open source project. The fact is, someone will and it will NOT be your company in this case.
In the case where your company is directly competing for the same account, why wouldn’t you be able to convince the client to hire you since you created the platform the competition is using? Your company should be the known absolute experts. Try to claim you can build a better basecamp.com using Ruby On Rails-pause for laughter.
Will making it open source improve the project? Tell your bosses you’ll be getting ‘free’ testing and bug fixing. The code base will become more solid. With your company as the sponsor, very few will be able to make any grand claims to being a better contributor than your company. It’s a marketing strategy.
Save the “make the world a better place” for the convention keynote address.
4