How Often are Internal IT Projects Open Sourced?

Posted by Cliff on Tuesday April 5, 2005 @10:47AM 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?"

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Most are reimps? by VultureMN · 2005-04-05 10:57 · 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?