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Comment by _pdp_ | Hacker News Reader

A bit of a side-topic but I am sure many people will resonate with this. My company has been considering making many internal projects open source - these are the foundations of our products. Why have we not done it yet? Well, it takes a lot of effort to go open source - more than people realise. We can't just dump bunch of sources out there - there is no point in doing that. We need to open them so that they are well documented, understood, have good support around the build system any many other things you don't need to consider when developing in-house products. So while open source is great and I love it as much as the next person it is not easy.

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I'd encourage you to do it anyway. We're on the same journey at my company. Some of our product is based on a fairly large and active open source project. Others are much more limited and simply at the "here's the code, have fun" stage.

There's different levels of "open source" (everything from one-way code dumps to full-on maintained-as-a-whole-distributed-global-team). In my experience, it's easier to start with a simple "here's the code, bug reports welcome". This starting point is generally an easier sell to management who's worried about project management taking too much time away from other work.

Like all things, practice, start small, and grow from there. Get's easier as you go. But yeah--licenses/legal, written policies, governance, marketing, time prioritization, and more all take a lot of time to figure out.

NB: My own background in open source biases me to thinking open source is "easy". It's not; it takes a lot of work. The good news is that there's a lot of tools and help available for anyone wanting to start.

This. There is a substantial cost to open sourcing software that too many people pretend doesn't exist. For a small company, the added cost of making software open source can be prohibitive and it isn't obvious where the extra money will come from to make it feasible.

I know of many cases where companies wanted to open source software but the plan was nixed when they realized how much it would cost versus keeping it closed. Or companies that did open source their software but the increase in burn rate was not offset by increased revenue.

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