Pligg is for sale on sedo.com of all places. I didnt even know you can actually “sell” an open source project/community. What if Linus decides one day to “sell” Linux? Can he even do that? This selling of an open source project is NOT a good trend to start but I do understand that someone (who?) deserves to make some money from the value generated from Pligg. Maybe there should be otherways to get to the same objective?

Before I jump in, a little background on pligg. Pligg is a popular open source software project that allows anyone to create a clone to Digg. John Battelle’s SearchMob is an good example of what Pligg is capable of. Its highly popular and I would estimate that over 5K websites run a version of Pligg.

Sedo seems like such a wierd place to sale a website/company/project too but, if I think about it; the main asset for sale is really just the domain & its associated website more than anything else. According to the listing, the following assets are for sell

- Domain name, Pligg.com
- Website sofware on Pligg.com (not the source code)
- Users on Pligg.com (around 10K)
- Admin Account to Pligg’s Sourceforge project area

Whats not for sale

- The source code
- The “trademark” Pligg

Which begs the following questions

- Who is actually selling these “Pligg related assets” ?
- Whose pocket is this going to?
- Does the contributors to the open source project deserve to get some of that cash?
- How about the contributors to the forum?
- Can “Pligg” the non-profit org sue the “owner” of Pligg.com for trademark infringement in the future?
- Does the new “owner” get to keep the donations coming to the site? (see the donate link on Pligg.com)
- Will the contributing community sit idlely while this new “owner” mucks with Pligg.com and try to make an extra buck? (more ads? consulting services? commercial version?)
- Will there be a showdown between those that made off with the dough and those who did not?
- Is this even “legally” possible? (ie sure those assets are “sellable” but can it be debundled? )
- How is this different than some user from Digg selling his or her account?
- Can the community block the sell? Esp with regard to the source forge account? (just like Digg can block a sell of an username)

In the end, the bigger question is. . . what is an open source community really worth? Who (which individual) has the right to sell an opensource community? If this becomes popular, one day, will Linus sell his “position” as the ultimate arbiter of Linux releases to Novell? Why wouldn’t someone like MSFT go out and just “buy up” an open source community to either control it or to kill it through random muddling thus forcing the code and community to splinter and fork?

I don’t have the answers, but I don’t see this ending up well if this trend moves beyond Pligg (which in the grand theme of things, is not that important of a open source project).

P.S. Lets not forget Source Forge is run by a for profit company while lots of “open source” projects are really controlled by private enterprises. So maybe this is not that out of the norm?

Lots of questions, but no answers . . .