title: Open Company: what advice would you give?
body: <p>Alexander Stigsen, author of <a href="http://e-texteditor.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">E Text Editor</a> is starting an ambitious project - called Open Company - in an attempt to combine the culture of open source software, with the remuneration of commercial. </p>
  
  <p><strong><a href="http://e-texteditor.com/blog/2009/opencompany" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Read the blog post announcing Open Company</a>.</strong></p>
  
  <p>Like I say, it's ambitious, but laudable, I am sure you'll agree.</p>
  
  <p><strong>My question to the community is: what advice would you give?</strong> I think it would be interesting to get a feel for what the burning issues and pitfalls are. Also, suggested reading, resources and research could be useful. I've already suggested reading <a href="http://producingoss.com/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Producing Open Source Software</a>.</p>
  
  <p>Edit: there has been some debate as to whether the code of E Text Editor will be open source or not. To answer that, yes <a href="http://e-texteditor.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=12764#12764" rel="nofollow noreferrer">it <strong>will</strong> be open to everyone</a> to download and modify, thus it will be open source. But it will also still be copyright and the product itself will not be freely distributable, so thus it will not be "Open Source" as <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Definition" rel="nofollow noreferrer">defined by the OSI</a>.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Update:</strong> The <a href="http://github.com/blog/401-e-text-editor-on-github" rel="nofollow noreferrer">source is now available on Github</a>, if you're interested.</p>