3 ms·

So in our case, the projects being open-sourced are not part of our core business. I guess our aims for open-sourcing them are two-fold: 1. To promote us in th

by philbo 12y ago

So in our case, the projects being open-sourced are not part of our core business. I guess our aims for open-sourcing them are two-fold: 1. To promote us in the eyes of prospective employees. 2. To benefit from collaboration on what would otherwise be in-house tools. That second point is something we're not seeing a ton of so far. Whether the presence of the GPL has an effect on that, is what I'm wondering. Unfortunately there have only been 6 responses to the survey so far, but that highly limited and unscientific sample would indicate that contributions aren't affected by the GPL.

brudgers 12y ago
There are more open source projects than volunteers. Something has to be pretty awesome to attract people's passions and time commitments. My impression is that a job is more attractive if the work includes working on popular open source projects used in-house than in-house projects that are open sourced. Lastly, many big companies will still need lawyering for anything open-sourced under GPL because they are targets for lawsuits and GPL is so easy to violate. GPL and other copyleft license compliance is not passive from the perspective of software developers, just from end users.