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How Often are Internal IT Projects Open Sourced?

Posted by Cliff on from the enlightened-business-entities dept.

An anonymous reader asks: "Most open source projects seem to started by individual contributors working in their personal capacity. I am thinking about projects like attendance maintenance systems, and not high-end infrastructure projects like Sun's Solaris. Most internal IT products are probably reimplementations of what exists at other companies, and do not bestow any competitive advantage to the developing company. The cost of developing the software is overhead, and they could potentially save money by open sourcing the projects and utilizing contributors' expertise. So, are there lots of instances of companies' internally developed IT products being open sourced?"

3 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. Most are reimps? by VultureMN · · Score: 5, Informative

    I doubt it. All the software I've worked on in-house would be absolutely useless outside the immediate company, and no-one without expert domain knowledge would be able to add much to it anyway. I'd wager that most inhouse stuff is =not= reimplementations of things other people are doing.

    Or do a lot of companies calculate the industry cost of sunday magazine coupon promotions?

  2. More likely you might improve exististing OSS by Neil+Blender · · Score: 2, Informative

    At all the companies I have worked at that use OSS have all taken something, improved it because they had a specific need for the improvement, then released the improvements. Our company is planning to do some optimizations to several OS statistical packages. However, the only reason we are going to do it, is because we need it to be faster.

    As other people have pointed out, the internally developed stuff will most likely stay internal because it is poorly written/documented or would be to valuable to give away for free.

    That said, if our company fails completely (ie not sold, just shuts its doors), I will advocate that the products be open sourced, because they very well could be.

  3. I open-source my university assignments by wikinerd · · Score: 3, Informative

    I always try to release under libre licences and open-source whatever I can, including my university assignments. Recently a professor asked us to program an Eliza-like chatbot, software that lets the user to discuss with a computer. He joked "the perfect language for chatbots is Perl, but you won't learn a new language just to write one program, will you?". I did: I was fascinated with the idea of learning a new language just to finish a university assignment, and I learnt Perl and finished the chatbot (including documentation) in 3 days. Now I published it under a permissive licence (BSD-like) and you can download the complete source code.

    Right now I am working on my B.Sc. individual project and dissertation, doing research and evaluation of modern content management systems and wikis, as well as developing my own wiki-CMS, and I intent to release it to the libre software community too.

    I encourage all students and employees to publish your work under libre licences, such as GPL, BSD or Creative-Commons, if this is allowed by your university or employer.