By joel reed.
The Problem
You believe Open Source can be helpful in many situations, but your
company has yet to learn about the advantages. What do you do? I’ve
started by attempting to show my company, DDI, how open sourcing some our
peripheral software would benefit us. Thus I’m starting out small,
with areas less contentious, in the hopes that this could become a
first step to something bigger. Here are the advantages I used to
show the value of Open Source, and the questions that I had to
answer before I got the okay.
Please send me any advantages or questions & answers you have
and I’ll add them to this list.
Advantages to open sourcing selected, peripheral company
software
- motivational for many engineers
- improved code quality, documentation because folks like their
peers to think they’re good! - improved code quality because many, many more “eyes” will be
reviewing the source code - the company can benefit from outside engineers submitting bug
fixes and feature enhancements (gift culture) - enhances the company’s high tech image for engineers we may
wish to bring in, and possibly in the larger HR community as
publicity around open source continues - creates _possible_ revenue streams by putting in house “jewels”
on display, rather than letting them “rot” in our version control
system. - minimal work involved on our side
Frequently asked Questions
Will our software engineers and QA folks need to spend time
testing patches/feature enhancements from outsiders?
Short answer: No. We will only accept patches that fit in with our
business/project goals, or in other words, only patches that
enhance time to market, product quality, lower development costs,
etc.
How do we decide what to open source?
For now, I’d recommend limiting it to peripheral software
components as decided by the development manager. Thus only
underlying libraries that we had to write to accomplish some basic,
generic tasks that others have probably also had to solve and would
find useful. We would not open source anything related to our core
technologies, which is what we are really selling and which only
our competitors might find interesting.
Can we change our minds about what we’ve done once we open
source some code?
We can always stop putting the code out on the Internet if we are
not seeing any real benefits. Consider this an experiment to see
how useful open sourcing might be.
The Internet is so big nowadays, how will anyone find our
code?
After we post the appropriate installation and usage documents and
the source code, we can let the Open Source community know of the
availability of our code by posting a news flash to Freshmeat or Linuxberg.
this document can be found here.