How to talk to your boss about open source | Hacker News Reader

How to talk to your boss about open source

opensource.org

Seems mostly focused on using open source, rather than contributing to open source, but the general concept can be applied to contributions as well: If you need to convince your supervisor to contribute code to open source, it's best to find out how this is good for the business.

For example, suppose your company uses some open source component Widget and did some internal work to enhance it. Now you want to contribute that work back to the community. What does the business gain from this? If someone changes Widget and your extension is internal, then it might break. But if your extension is part of the open source repo - along with integration tests - now anyone working on Widget will make sure that it still works with the extension. It's a bit cynical, but the end result is more open source contributions.

Dev: "I want to use open source".

Boss: "I'm not sure..."

Dev: "It's free."

Boss: "Sold."

I recently had a potential employer tell me they didn't use open source software because they can afford the expensive stuff.

It's really hard to argue with what amounts to vanity. I didn't take the job.

IME some people get uncomfortable when receiving something for free, since they're used to there being a catch (e.g. "if you're not paying for the product, then YOU are the product", and TBF that can sometimes be the case if you're not cautious with the licensing). In fact, paying for a support or enterprise plan sometimes goes over better with management than the "free" path.

In my experience this rarely works at big companies. IT purchasing decision makers at large companies always have armies of proprietary vendors whispering open-source FUD in their ear, and price alone is not enough to counteract that. Sometimes "free" is even seen as a negative.

Sadly, sometimes it's about liability and having someone to blame when something goes down/wrong.

But you can have that even with open source. Just look at Red Hat.

True but depending on the business, it's not always possible.

You can always hire a software developer, can't you?

Also need to check with legal department

Best advice: find another boss.

If your boss doesn't understand open source, he is probably not interested in tech, which means you're a cost center, which means he'd rather not have you at all.

Should be the boss interested in tech? He has you to be interested in tech. And the boss makes decisions and manages money.

We make here in Big Corp jokes, that 2 layers of management above us has tech knowledge from reading Wikipedia. Meanwhile I go into project management and see how I loose the touch with tech. Every fart (sorry) becomes Company Confidential Information. And I don’t want to be the one who allows leaking it in some open source activity.

> Should be the boss interested in tech? He has you to be interested in tech. And the boss makes decisions and manages money.

A good leader doesn't make decisions most of the time. You can lead people who work on things you aren't interested in, but doing that means you need to give up control and let them make decisions.

One of the biggest frustrations I've had to deal with in my career are working with upper level managers who aren't very tech savvy but insist on making technical decisions against the advice of the people whose job it is to provide technical leadership.

Not sure why this is downvoted, that's the only real way of having that talk.

Non-technical management is typically a red flag.

I would like to know as an employer. How to talk to employees respectively about open source? This is a problem from the ground up, nor a top down problem.

I’m both eternally thankful and also slightly broken for new projects that I spent some time working for GDS, who have the requirement that all code produced is open source, unless you’ve got a very good reason why it should be closed.

https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/service-standard/point-12-...

In my experience:

- It makes us more hirable

Nowadays every new engineer wants to contribute to open source.

That's been my experience too. In addition to attracting new engineers that want to contribute to open source, it's an opportunity to showcase your organization's (hopefully good) coding practices to candidates.

My experience is that when mentioning Open Source I get FUD pushback.

How do you convince people to use open source vs cloud services? The problem is running open source yourself (on VM's etc) is more costly than just using AWS etc

The assumption that the boss doesn't know about open source is "interesting."

That's what unions are for.

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