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> and a stable employment (work for a good large business while open-sourcing what’s possible) Even if it was hypothetically possible to open-source basically

> and a stable employment (work for a good large business while open-sourcing what’s possible) Even if it was hypothetically possible to open-source basically everything that the team in which I work produces: The software that I work on is very specialized software that is used by the company's employees and customers for specialized purposes. Imagine some nice LoB application that is actually somewhat comfortable to use. It basically does "what the users need" and is thus deeply ingrained in some parts of the company's workflows. The only use someone outside the industry might have for it is "cosplaying being employed in this industry". A lot of software that is developed (in particular in companies that don't sell or rent software) is of this kind. Thus: the open-source scene does in my opinion not have any use for a huge amount of software that is actually developed and actively used.

strogonoff 3y ago
> The software that I work on is very specialized software that is used by the company's employees and customers for specialized purposes Oh really? Welcome to the club. Our very specialized software for very specialized purposes used Django with a certain auth provider. So I refactored that into a standalone Django app that painlessly handles this specific OAuth provider, configurable via settings with sane defaults, and open-sourced it. (The refactoring was very beneficial to myself, that part of the project got instantly nicer to work with.) Of course, it is small beans compared to something algorithmically hardcore (I was a junior myself back then), but it’s just an example. Any software, no matter how specialized and bespoke, can be expressed as many self-contained isolated components that individually know nothing about that specialization and bespokeness. In fact, such factoring is generally a sign of good design: you may have heard of the loose coupling & high cohesion principle—once you follow it, open-sourcing a particular component is very straightforward. Note, though, that if your contract has certain licensing provisions in certain countries you may not be allowed to unilaterally open-source anything during the full term of employment (even if it is unrelated to your dayjob). You may need to get approval first. However, many good tech companies are reasonable when it comes to open-sourcing non-core components.

strogonoff 3y ago

> The software that I work on is very specialized software that is used by the company's employees and customers for specialized purposes Oh really? Welcome to the club. Our very specialized software for very specialized purposes used Django with a certain auth provider. So I refactored that into a standalone Django app that painlessly handles this specific OAuth provider, configurable via settings with sane defaults, and open-sourced it. (The refactoring was very beneficial to myself, that part of the project got instantly nicer to work with.) Of course, it is small beans compared to something algorithmically hardcore (I was a junior myself back then), but it’s just an example. Any software, no matter how specialized and bespoke, can be expressed as many self-contained isolated components that individually know nothing about that specialization and bespokeness. In fact, such factoring is generally a sign of good design: you may have heard of the loose coupling & high cohesion principle—once you follow it, open-sourcing a particular component is very straightforward. Note, though, that if your contract has certain licensing provisions in certain countries you may not be allowed to unilaterally open-source anything during the full term of employment (even if it is unrelated to your dayjob). You may need to get approval first. However, many good tech companies are reasonable when it comes to open-sourcing non-core components.