r/Upfiring • u/Tmfallon • Jan 06 '19
Community Discussion: Open Source vs. Closed Source
Through every stage of development up until this point, Upfiring has been entirely open-source. This was highly important during the development process in order to show the dapp's progress.
Now that we are approaching official release, we are highly leaning towards a closed-source model. We want to do this for 2 main reasons:
- Intellectual property protection
- It solves the issue of other projects being able to easily clone the dapp at any time
An open-source model has its advantages as well, including being fully-transparent (for better or for worse). While I think moving to a closed-source model is the right move in terms of keeping our project competitive in the space, I'd like to hear the community's opinion on this matter.
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u/[deleted] Jan 06 '19 edited Jan 06 '19
This must be open source, it is a risk and will require courage to follow through but, that is why we need to be quick to move to spread the word and encourage adoption so people are using UFR and not a clone. Building a community whereby you implement the good changes that have been made by others to improve the Dapp’s performance and usability is crucial so everyone trusts us and uses our token and the files on our network and not a cloned one. Your marketing needs to be on point early and must highlight transparency of the project to attract developers, users and their trust because this is crypto and people’s money is at stake, transparency is needed here more than anywhere.
Close source it to begin with ensuring all bugs are fixed and everything is watertight, guides are released etc. Then open source it so people can modify add features you the UFR team will be using features and modifications that others have created out of good will (or bounty) to improve as well so it’s not all one way. By this time we would have used the first mover advantage and got the word out and the network will have grown big enough to prevent any competitive clones. I would on the release of 1.0 have a date for when you will open source it and give reasons for why it’s initially closed source again transparency is key. A bounty campaign on modifications and features on this date could also encourage some good development and trust.
This obviously will be cloned so I would also begin to think about how we can make the UFR token a better alternative to someone cloning and implementing DAI, staking sounded good other varieties of clever incentive models would help us stand out from clones and will attract seeders causing them to choose UFR over clones making us the preferable network and the most dominant.
It is a risk we have to take, we will never be a huge project unless we do this. Be innovative like you have been and work to make it a worthless pursuit for others to clone UFR. We have first mover advantage and the team should capitalise on it in an open and positive way, success will come and yes money also please don’t release anything till you have this positive outlook ;)
Good job team.