As someone near the beginning of their career, the corporate attitude surrounding open source terrifies me. I spent a year with a company that made random weat

As someone near the beginning of their career, the corporate attitude surrounding open source terrifies me. I spent a year with a company that made random weatherproof devices and developed a desktop interface for copying data off. It communicated over a simple bluetooth or serial interface using a pre-defined set of commands. We started to get requests to open source the desktop app because people wanted to add some features to it (data export, etc) but when we approached management about doing so, they were horrified and said that it was all proprietary. How on earth is a few thousand lines of Qt code with no algorithmic complexity at all considered proprietary? It couldn't do anything to the device or dump firmware or anything, just receive data. Nobody seemed to understand that if we let the community do some of the work, that was, in essence, free engineering time and the employees could stop wasting their time and work on the device firmware instead. Edit: The best part was that we were using some of the libraries in a way that there was ambiguity over whether we needed to open source the application so instead, they paid the Qt foundation $5k for the enterprise licence instead of the GPL version...