The Inquisitive Coder – Davy Brion's Blog

As some of you already know, my company recently gave me permission to open-source our Request/Response Service Layer as the Agatha project. Now, i originally wrote most of that code in my spare time, but it has been refined into something that is production-worthy and has been extended by myself and some of my coworkers during company time. It’s something that saves us time (and thus, money) and improves the quality of our projects, so why would we just give it away to others to freely use it?

Well first of all, because it wouldn’t really hurt us in any way. It’s not a product that makes us money. It’s just something that has turned out to help us in the development of our projects. Just like we use other open source libraries to help us with the development of our projects. Giving other people or companies the ability to use this isn’t really anything to be scared about, because as a company, your assets should be the people you work with, and not which technology you use (seriously, think about the importance of that for a second).

Secondly, and most importantly, because we can actually benefit from giving something away. A couple of days ago, Arjen Smits (no blog, so no link) submitted a patch to add a new feature (more on this in a later post) to Agatha. While the feature is not groundbreaking, it can be very useful and is most certainly a valuable addition to Agatha. There was one instance during the closed-source lifetime of Agatha where we really could’ve used that feature, but due to lack of available time we couldn’t implement it at that time and we kinda tried to achieve the same thing with a workaround. It worked, but it was nevertheless a workaround for something that Agatha should’ve supported in the first place anyway.

Because we open-sourced it, we now get to benefit from a useful new feature that didn’t cost us anything to develop. And while the project is still very young, and this is the only contribution so far, this already makes it worth it in my opinion. Will we get more valuable contributions like that in the future? Obviously, we can’t be sure about that but i’d be pretty surprised if this is the last valuable contribution that we’re going to receive for it.