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I went through the hoops of open sourcing some code in a global 50 company. The development team push for it restlessly for a year. The reality is that the cult
by pierre 7y ago
I went through the hoops of open sourcing some code in a global 50 company. The development team push for it restlessly for a year. The reality is that the culture in not there yet and I had to go through security, compliance and legal. We had to rewrite some code as one of our apache 2.0 dependency had some GPL dependencies.
We finally get the go when we cornered an exec during an off site event and he finally agreed to let us do it.
Big company are unfortunatly not ready by default to contribute back, it s not in the culture, and you get pushback from internal IT team thinking the code / architecture / documentation is not good enough yet to open source (hint : it never is) once you have clear the compliance / legal / branding / security side of things.
Hats down for the tech lead / dev / manager that convinced ING to open source this one. I hope that getting in front of HN will allow the dev team to get a little more budget to maintain this project a little longer.
- d4kmor 7y agohey, one of the devs that pushed for it here. Fully correct - getting everyone on board and then to actually approve it took a long time and a huge amount of effort. Even then although the code was open source we had been in a pilot phase where we have not been allowed to promote it. But now it's share it is much as you can And yes we hope to get a big community externally and internally which will improve the components overall
- DangerousPie 7y agoGiven the amount of work and legal risks involved do you really blame them for being reluctant though? How many man-hours were spent on sorting out all the legal issues, doing the rewrites you mention etc?
- pierre 7y ago~6 man months in my case.
- DangerousPie 7y agoDo you think the benefits of open sourcing will make that worth it? How? I'm honestly asking, I'm curious how people do the cost/benefit analysis for things like this.
- pierre 7y agoMostly worth it for the team. Its good to be working on opensource project full time. Also as an internaly, explaining this project have N star buy you political capital and facilitate access to extra funding to pursue the project longer.