Some have theorized that doing things like adding a new detection engine to Snort that could do gigabit speeds and then giving it away was a Bad Idea because it allowed our Snort-based competitors to have a more level playing field with which to compete against us. My opinion is that it keeps the ball moving forward and keeps people’s eyes on what we’re doing instead of letting them get bored and going off to check out some other more rapidly developing OSS technology or a commercial solution. Letting your technology get stagnant is almost as bad as closing the technology, once the community is bored they’ll be looking elsewhere for something exciting. One important point to note in this regard (in a product company) is that just because you’re releasing advances to the open source community at large doesn’t mean that you are required to drive your differentiation from that technology to zero. If you want to be able to get people to want to pay for what you do, then having some sort of key differentiation is a must! At Sourcefire we did things like developing a complementary technology that allowed us to address one of the toughest problems in the intrusion detection world, false positives. If you can’t maintain differentiation against your open source product or your competitors that use your open source technology, then you’ve got a problem that you need to get creative around, closing the technology isn’t an acceptable answer in my opinion.Once you’ve open sourced your technology then you have to approach its continued development as a community building exercise that works best by advancing the technology and trying to maintain community-friendly policies and programs. If you do this and try to be clueful about interacting with the open source users as the company grows (a whole different topic) then you have the foundation necessary to build a business of substance. That’s the principle that I originally built Sourcefire on and so far it has worked pretty well.