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How Often are Internal IT Projects Open Sourced?
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?"
Well, I just recently received the blessing to release a bunch of internal PHP tools I made as open source... a test case management system, an inventory library system, and a scheduled task notification system.
It helps a lot when you can easily point out that the tools you want open sourced have nothing to do with the core function of the company, and are really serving a generic purpose and could be used by others. (It also helps to have designed the tools with this in mind from the start.)
My company asked that the company's name be included somewhere in the softwares' materials in the releases I was involved with; I figured this was a small favor to go along with, and it helped them appreciate the idea as having some sort of paid-forward benefit.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
I'm the author of one of those "monstrosities" you're talking about. Initially I was embarrased to hypothetically release it but then I realised that almost all of the projects on SF simply don't work as well as my hack does. If my app was released onto SF I'd consider working on it from home too which is something I will NOT do if its just at work...
My application is a web based timesheet program. The only part I'm "proud" of is the pdf timesheet generation. Other than that the application runs, with almost zero maintenance (occasionally a strange bug pops up on average once every three months). The part I'm least proud of is the interface which looks worse than slashdot.. and the code that generates it has SQL, PHP, and php generated javascript all in one file (ie a total mess). It is reasonably well commented though since I've had to have other people working on it. Oh the database sucks too since it was converted directly from an excel sheet its pretty much one huge table... whoops..
My feeling is getting the company to actually release its previous IP freely unto the world would be an uphill battle. Maybe there is a different culture in other companies but mine is heavily protective and risk adverse in that sense.
groklaw, wired and slashdot. The holy trinity of work based time wasting.
Recently, though, there was some functionality I wanted added to ClamAV, an open-source virus scanner. Basically, I wanted to make sure the milter was running. So, I wrote clmilter_watch, a tool to monitor the functionality of clamav-milter. Of course, I don't trust my own programming skills enough to know if it's stable for production use. So, it gets released to the world. A few downloads later, I get a couple of suggested patches, and the thing is pretty solid. Everyone wins.