Slashdot Mirror
Convincing Your Superiors to GPL the Code?
jakobgrimstveit asks: "At work I've been developing an intranet/extranet portal framework in PHP based on many other peoples work, including quite a few PEAR modules. I've always wanted to release the coding framework as GPL and publish it on SourceForge, and my boss has - impressively enough - not been too negative about this. This has been going around in the organization for quite a while now, and finally the reply from the company's president was (not surprisingly): 'Why should we do so?' I now have the task of writing a document listing the main reasons for GPLing the code, and this is where I turn to the highly competent Slashdot crowd: How do I convince my bosses to GPL the code I've written? I assume many other developers have the same problems trying to convince their bosses to open up their code."
"...finally the reply from the company's president was (not surprisingly): 'Why should we do so?' I now have the task of writing a document listing the main reasons for GPLing the code..."
Instead of bleating on about "free-as-in-speech", why did you not create a high-level, plain English explanation of the pros and cons of GPL *before* you started this whole process? This reminds me of the time that some 2:2 grad joined my dept and tried to convince the boss that we should change the OpenBSD firewall to run Gentoo. When asked "why?", the new starter replied "Because it's free!". We sacked him two weeks later for negligence when he rm -rf'd a development server.
We now only hire people with 5+ years of solid UNIX experience who have at least one Cisco (e.g. CCNP) and one security (e.g. CISSP, CISA) qualifcation and have previously held SC/DV security clearance. Not suprisingly we have not had the same problem again.