Corporate Open Source Software

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Why do many corporations insist on reinventing the wheel?

I recently proposed we open source some software we are writing. I did this it's a pretty cool concept and we cannot afford any developers. I went and spoke with a few of my cohorts at other companies and they thought it would be a cool project to work on, but our company cannot currently afford to pay these folks.

Hmmmm, what to do? I know! we'll make the core infrastructure of the project open-source.... perhaps get a free version of Jira/confluence and start building a communnity around it.

This has the benefit of getting some (potentially) high quality developers to work in it for free, and additionally if I leave, I get to use this software at my new location. From my employers perspective, they will still get fixes after I leave (it's open source, everyone will right?). This sounds like such a win win win situation that I was excited to share this idea with my team.

Needless to say it did not fly well and a somewhat blank stare was about all I got. I see it will take some more wrangling to drum up support for this, there was not a huge amount of support for the concept.

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