Long, But May Help Others Considering Releasing a Project as Open Source

[Jason Alan Smith <jsmith435 cox net>]

Fellow coders, I would very much appreciate your opinions.

I have two massive (lots of features, ideas, coding required, time
involved, etc.) ideas for applications I want to develop and release to
the open source community.  I have had these ideas for over five years
and during these years I have pondered writing them in Visual Basic and
then selling them for profit and I have also pondered releasing them as
open source applications.  I have for the last few years now completely
dedicated myself to the idea of open source, and have therefore rid my
house of anything Microsoft, except for some hardware.

You may have seen me post here lately with questions on problems I have
encountered.  I have begun to prototype (more get to know c++ and how to
program/use the GTKMM toolkit) one of these applications.  I am however,
stopping coding as of several days ago, and have begun work on a
requirements specification.  I want to do these projects correctly,
using processes I have learned from reading so many books on software
design and engineering.

However, I have recently asked my parents if they would like to get
involved, call it the foundation of a family business (selling/doing
support for these applications, selling printed manuals, etc., not
selling the software which goes against my grain).  My parents both said
I should write it and sell it, but I refused.  They then said not to
make the specification or design documents public until I have started
coding it and released it so that others could not take the idea (the
specifications) and build it and sell it before I get it out there
first.

The problem I have with that is that I intended to release the
specifications to my web site and announce the document in places and
get feedback from the open source community (my audience in developing
this product).  They were just so afraid that someone was going to steal
my idea and make money from it... my idea so they think I should get any
financial gain.

I want to believe that people in the open source community are not
thieves and would not do such a thing, but then they came back with what
about commercial-minded people watching open source projects for ideas
for their companies to take and profit from.  Basically, though very
paranoid sounding, they did get me thinking.

I will admit that I want to do this for several reasons, some selfish,
and some not:  I do want to give something to the open source community,
I do want the recognition of having come up with the concept and started
its development, I don't want money directly, but I do hope that someone
like Novel or Redhat might pick up the project and make it part of their
distribution and with a little luck hire me as a work from home
maintainer/coder for the apps and that would be more the financial gain
I really want from these, and with the recognition also comes being able
to put these projects on a resume for future employers.  That pretty
much sums up what I want out of giving something to the open source
community, and by recognition I don't mean major publicity and talk
shows and books and that crap, I basically just don't others to take
credit for what I did and started.  Open source to me describes very
much my political beliefs, in that human life driven by working to
acquire money to pay bills and buy toys is not living at all, but modern
day slavery.  So when I say give to the open source community, that's
not just a cover store for all the other reasons mentioned, it is a
genuine desire.

What do you all think of the concerns that have been raised?  If you
were in my shoes, would you proceed as planned and release the
specifications and get public feedback and put it out there?  Aside from
releasing the docs and software under the GPL (and there is a
documentation license I think) are there any other things you would do
to maintain the integrity of your ideas?  Or am I being way too
paranoid?

I do very much appreciate you taking time to read this rather long post.
But I sincerely hope that the topic may help others who are considering
releasing their ideas as open source or not.

Thank you very much for your time,

Jason Smith