As I have written before, we are preparing to open source our primary product. Open sourcing a product requires technical work to refactor and expose a clean interface so that the code is manageable by non-ArrayFire employees.
The difficulty is that we have paying clients. It is hard to allocate resources to work on an open source project when there are more paying clients than we can service already.
Yet, we truly believe the open source project is important and will ultimately benefit our company more than any individual project on our plate right now.
So we are choosing to forego some work (or at least forego the pace of our work) in order to invest in the open source work for our market. The opportunity cost is real, but we have a long term vision.
I can easily see this being a trend in our company as we seek to both maintain open source code while also delivering value to our clients. We will always need to allocate sufficient time and resources to the open source work despite the paid job demands, in order to continually invest in our future.
What are your thoughts on the opportunity costs required for a successful open source mode?
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