I want to ask the advice of the monks of this monestary, since I expect some of you probably have been in a similar situation before.

First some background. I'm starting a small business with a friend of mine. We will mainly concentrate on offering web design services, web applications and a bit of e-commerce.

I have developped in Perl (ok, reinventing the wheel a bit, but...) a system that allow a website owner to update the content of his site through html forms. He can manipulate text, structure and cascading style sheets with a nice, simple enough interface. We bundle the software with web sites we design so our clients can do their own updates.

The questions I was pondering are the following:

Should I open source my application? I got a lot from the open source movement, and would like to give something back. But I need to still be able to "sell" my application to my clients. Another thing is that maybe no one will be interested in my software. In that case, why bother? Also there is the licensing issue. Can a open source license protect me more legally? Which license would better suits my needs? Finally, if I decide to open source my application, what steps should I take to do so?

Last but not least, would _not_ open sourcing my application make me Evil(tm)?

Thanks in advance for all your opinions, they will be considered.

Guillaume

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.