10 ms·

How to talk to your boss about open source

gfiorav 5y ago
In my experience: - It makes us more hirable Nowadays every new engineer wants to contribute to open source.
- itsronenh 5y ago
  That's been my experience too. In addition to attracting new engineers that want to contribute to open source, it's an opportunity to showcase your organization's (hopefully good) coding practices to candidates.
tomerv 5y ago
Seems mostly focused on using open source, rather than contributing to open source, but the general concept can be applied to contributions as well: If you need to convince your supervisor to contribute code to open source, it's best to find out how this is good for the business. For example, suppose your company uses some open source component Widget and did some internal work to enhance it. Now you want to contribute that work back to the community. What does the business gain from this? If someone changes Widget and your extension is internal, then it might break. But if your extension is part of the open source repo - along with integration tests - now anyone working on Widget will make sure that it still works with the extension. It's a bit cynical, but the end result is more open source contributions.
jbverschoor 5y ago
Best advice: find another boss. If your boss doesn't understand open source, he is probably not interested in tech, which means you're a cost center, which means he'd rather not have you at all.
- lnsru 5y ago
  Should be the boss interested in tech? He has you to be interested in tech. And the boss makes decisions and manages money. We make here in Big Corp jokes, that 2 layers of management above us has tech knowledge from reading Wikipedia. Meanwhile I go into project management and see how I loose the touch with tech. Every fart (sorry) becomes Company Confidential Information. And I don’t want to be the one who allows leaking it in some open source activity.
  - rebeccaskinner 5y ago
    > Should be the boss interested in tech? He has you to be interested in tech. And the boss makes decisions and manages money. A good leader doesn't make decisions most of the time. You can lead people who work on things you aren't interested in, but doing that means you need to give up control and let them make decisions. One of the biggest frustrations I've had to deal with in my career are working with upper level managers who aren't very tech savvy but insist on making technical decisions against the advice of the people whose job it is to provide technical leadership.
- 908B64B197 5y ago
  Not sure why this is downvoted, that's the only real way of having that talk. Non-technical management is typically a red flag.
usrbinbash 5y ago
Dev: "I want to use open source". Boss: "I'm not sure..." Dev: "It's free." Boss: "Sold."
- fartcannon 5y ago
  I recently had a potential employer tell me they didn't use open source software because they can afford the expensive stuff. It's really hard to argue with what amounts to vanity. I didn't take the job.
- NeutralForest 5y ago
  Sadly, sometimes it's about liability and having someone to blame when something goes down/wrong.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    But you can have that even with open source. Just look at Red Hat.
    - NeutralForest 5y ago
      True but depending on the business, it's not always possible.
      - fsflover 5y ago
        You can always hire a software developer, can't you?
- dreamcompiler 5y ago
  In my experience this rarely works at big companies. IT purchasing decision makers at large companies always have armies of proprietary vendors whispering open-source FUD in their ear, and price alone is not enough to counteract that. Sometimes "free" is even seen as a negative.
hsnewman 5y ago
My experience is that when mentioning Open Source I get FUD pushback.
robin_reala 5y ago
I’m both eternally thankful and also slightly broken for new projects that I spent some time working for GDS, who have the requirement that all code produced is open source, unless you’ve got a very good reason why it should be closed. https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/service-standard/point-12-make-new-source-code-open https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/service-standard/point-12-...
aauser1234 5y ago
How do you convince people to use open source vs cloud services? The problem is running open source yourself (on VM's etc) is more costly than just using AWS etc
goodpoint 5y ago
That's what unions are for.
anamax 5y ago
The assumption that the boss doesn't know about open source is "interesting."
ngold 5y ago
I would like to know as an employer. How to talk to employees respectively about open source? This is a problem from the ground up, nor a top down problem.

In my experience: - It makes us more hirable Nowadays every new engineer wants to contribute to open source.

itsronenh 5y ago
That's been my experience too. In addition to attracting new engineers that want to contribute to open source, it's an opportunity to showcase your organization's (hopefully good) coding practices to candidates.

Seems mostly focused on using open source, rather than contributing to open source, but the general concept can be applied to contributions as well: If you need to convince your supervisor to contribute code to open source, it's best to find out how this is good for the business. For example, suppose your company uses some open source component Widget and did some internal work to enhance it. Now you want to contribute that work back to the community. What does the business gain from this? If someone changes Widget and your extension is internal, then it might break. But if your extension is part of the open source repo - along with integration tests - now anyone working on Widget will make sure that it still works with the extension. It's a bit cynical, but the end result is more open source contributions.

jbverschoor 5y ago

Best advice: find another boss. If your boss doesn't understand open source, he is probably not interested in tech, which means you're a cost center, which means he'd rather not have you at all.

lnsru 5y ago
Should be the boss interested in tech? He has you to be interested in tech. And the boss makes decisions and manages money. We make here in Big Corp jokes, that 2 layers of management above us has tech knowledge from reading Wikipedia. Meanwhile I go into project management and see how I loose the touch with tech. Every fart (sorry) becomes Company Confidential Information. And I don’t want to be the one who allows leaking it in some open source activity.
- rebeccaskinner 5y ago
  > Should be the boss interested in tech? He has you to be interested in tech. And the boss makes decisions and manages money. A good leader doesn't make decisions most of the time. You can lead people who work on things you aren't interested in, but doing that means you need to give up control and let them make decisions. One of the biggest frustrations I've had to deal with in my career are working with upper level managers who aren't very tech savvy but insist on making technical decisions against the advice of the people whose job it is to provide technical leadership.
908B64B197 5y ago
Not sure why this is downvoted, that's the only real way of having that talk. Non-technical management is typically a red flag.

usrbinbash 5y ago

Dev: "I want to use open source". Boss: "I'm not sure..." Dev: "It's free." Boss: "Sold."

fartcannon 5y ago
I recently had a potential employer tell me they didn't use open source software because they can afford the expensive stuff. It's really hard to argue with what amounts to vanity. I didn't take the job.
NeutralForest 5y ago
Sadly, sometimes it's about liability and having someone to blame when something goes down/wrong.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- josephcsible 5y ago
  But you can have that even with open source. Just look at Red Hat.
  - NeutralForest 5y ago
    True but depending on the business, it's not always possible.
    - fsflover 5y ago
      You can always hire a software developer, can't you?
dreamcompiler 5y ago
In my experience this rarely works at big companies. IT purchasing decision makers at large companies always have armies of proprietary vendors whispering open-source FUD in their ear, and price alone is not enough to counteract that. Sometimes "free" is even seen as a negative.

hsnewman 5y ago

My experience is that when mentioning Open Source I get FUD pushback.

robin_reala 5y ago

I’m both eternally thankful and also slightly broken for new projects that I spent some time working for GDS, who have the requirement that all code produced is open source, unless you’ve got a very good reason why it should be closed. https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/service-standard/point-12-make-new-source-code-open https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/service-standard/point-12-...

aauser1234 5y ago

How do you convince people to use open source vs cloud services? The problem is running open source yourself (on VM's etc) is more costly than just using AWS etc

goodpoint 5y ago

That's what unions are for.

anamax 5y ago

The assumption that the boss doesn't know about open source is "interesting."

ngold 5y ago

I would like to know as an employer. How to talk to employees respectively about open source? This is a problem from the ground up, nor a top down problem.