Getting Companies to Contribute to Open Source?

epiphani writes "At my company, we make heavy use of Open Source products in almost all work we do. We also spend significant amounts of time customizing these packages to our needs, be they for performance or functionality. With the exception of actual bug fixes, we are not generally permitted to return those customizations to the community. The GPL allows us to customize these packages for internal use, and we do not distribute our changes outside our organization. Being an open source developer in my spare time, I can see the value of these customizations, and can see how they could be improved by releasing them into the community. However, the company does not allow us to return them because they are seen as our investment and as our competitive edge over others in the same market. We have thousands of hours of code development and packages we are being forced to maintain internally as a result. How can I, being a lowly developer, convince our management that it makes more sense to release many of these customizations back into the Open Source community? How have people convinced old-corporate management that its a good idea to give away something we just spent three months building?"

Comments

start small

[iocat]

Start small, with a dicrete component, and emphasize the PR benefit. "MegaCom Gives Back" will raise some goodwill for the company. Talk to someone in PR/Marketing -- they are always looking for new press release to do. Now is a great time too, "MegaCom gives back for the Holidays!"

#1 - Cheaper to Share the Cost of Maintenance

[mkcmkc]

One argument is that it's cheaper to share the maintenance cost of all of these deltas, which the poster suggests is significant. (And any company that wants to use the shared code but doesn't want to share back will find itself in the same bind your's is in now.)