To Open Source Or Not To Open Source?

Rails
1

I have been receviving a lot of feedback on Adoppt.com and based on the
feedback, I have one question:

Should I open source my project? What are benefits / drawbacks?

Adoppt employs many principles that I have learned over the years.
Alongwith my upcoming Pro Rails book, it will be something nice to give
back to the community.

So far I think I would like to Open Source the software only for
personal use and place a licensing fee for commercial use. Is that
possible with Open Source? I know MySQL does something like this.

If I do Open Source it, should I host the code myself or put it on
Sourceforge or Rubyforge?

Questions / Ideas / Experiences / Suggestions Welcome

Frank

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2

It’s difficult in practice to open source for personal use only. Most
standard O/S licenses specifically exclude limitiations on use. MySQL
used
to do this, but recently they clarified their licensing terms. They
have a
pure GPL license. While they offer a commercial product, it’s primarily
support that they’re billing for (and possibly some advanced features
and
packaging - I haven’t looked closely as I use Postgres).

Some people allow free non-commercial use, but withhold the source. You
may
find something like that works.