IMO, it shows how they don't plan to make any money from this, don't consider it a large competitive advantage, and think that the largest advantage of open sourcing it are the 'free' open source volunteers will improve the software.

It's interesting that they don't consider it a large enough competitive advantage.

Either that or they are using this to attract engineers.

> Either that or they are using this to attract engineers.

On a related note (I can't speak for Dropbox specifically) there are many engineers who desire their work to be open source for their own motivations, and when it's not a significant business risk to do so, nice companies will allow it.

So it works on two fronts, as a "hey, we'll let you open source your stuff" and a "hey, we've got people here who care about and contribute to open source."

You also open source if it's in your best interest for something to become the 'standard'.

In google there is a regret that they didn't open source a lot of stuff, because it ends up being reproduced outside of google in some form. The open source companies have an advantage in hiring and overall advancement of their product by using the open source version whatever their internal version was.

You also see it in facebook's open source initiatives, like react, buck, haxe and so on.

Without taking anything away from their generous announcement, it's very much in their interest for .lep files to become a standard so that they do not have to transcode to jpeg when users are viewing files on DropBox. I'm happy they released it.

> In google there is a regret that they didn't open source a lot of stuff, because it ends up being reproduced outside of google in some form.

What regret? A lot of the open-source clones of Google's internal projects come from Google themselves.

Wait, since when is Facebook pushing for Haxe? I tried looking it up, but I'm not finding much. It would be really cool (I love Haxe). But I'm guessing you only went a bit over the top with that particular example.

Sorry that was a typo. I meant HHVM and Hack http://hhvm.com/

Then why do you admire them? Would you also admire them if you were their investor? Dropbox management is obligated by law to act in the best interests of their shareholders, i.e. to make them as much profit as possible.

It's more likely that they have released it because of some profit-seeking interest. They are not charity.

> Dropbox management is obligated by law to act in the best interests of their shareholders, i.e. to make them as much profit as possible.

Can you cite the law which you believe makes that obligation?

The reason you can't is because it's not actually a legal requirement and the reason is obvious: it's hard to say what the best interest is over all but the shortest time frame:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_judgment_rule

Dropbox's management might argue that they benefit more from open-source than they're giving away, that this kind of favorable attention will help them hire the top engineers who make far larger contributions to their bottom-line, that the pricing models are complex enough that this just doesn't matter very much, etc. Absent evidence that they're acting in bad faith, it's almost impossible to say in advance whether those arguments are right or wrong.

"Dropbox management is obligated by law to act in the best interests of their shareholders, i.e. to make them as much profit as possible." - no they are not.

http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2015/04/16/what-are-cor...

Even if that was their obligation (which it's not, as others have pointed out), there's no reason to believe that keeping the algorithm proprietary would be more profitable. They're not handing a critical capability to their competitors (competing with Dropbox isn't fundamentally about cheap storage). They don't have the infrastructure to licence the algorithm (who should they licence it to? For how much? Under which terms? Those are not simple questions to answer.)

Releasing it freely allows it to work its way into browsers, allowing Dropbox to serve up the smaller images directly to users, saving money on bandwidth. It allows other users to contribute improvements. It markets Dropbox as a desirable place to work for engineers.

Not obviously less profitable that the opposite.

I admire them because they certainly considered the pros and cons of doing so, and decided that they feel secure enough in their market position and prefer to give this back to the open source community

Pretty much every modern company safes tremendous amounts of money from open source (Linux and upwards in the stack), and so the OSS community should rightly be considered a STAKEholder.

The share vs stakeholder obsession in the space of large companies and corporations represents a lot that's wrong with our current markets.

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Also, the only upside to open sourcing this is getting other involved in development. I just tested on 10k images, and the promise both on compression rate and bit parity after decompression holds true.

Seems to be a pretty stable product, so the that motivation is probably only miniscule.

There's also the upside of attracting other talented developers to come work at Dropbox if Lepton is representative of the kind of project they might be working on.

They are a private company, they can actually ask their shareholders how they wish them to act.

Does it make a difference? Can't public companies do the same at shareholder meetings, or declare what the intentions of the company are before going public? For (a poor) example, Google declared at IPO they would never pay dividends.