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Inner Source Commons

innersourcecommons.org

15 pointssoftwaredoug12 comments

My company, Adevinta, adopted this last year. As you can imagine, some higher-ups pushed this idea as an initiative to improve our efficiency as a company. Let's improve our tech culture! We are going to benefit from less code duplication, more collaboration between teams, and we are going to build reusable software across teams.

What do you think happened after one year of pushing this idea down our throats? Exactly. Nothing. Despite months of documenting the initiative, organizing workshops and brainstorming sessions, and managers pushing engineers to make pull requests to other teams' codebases, no progress was made.

The sad thing is that the higher-ups and managers that wasted our time are not going to hold any accountability or responsibility for the decision... Like it usually happens in big companies.

Sounds like change management didn’t work. Culture shifts never work without a large amount of change management and someone who sponsored the initiative should be accountable.

I avoid shared code. It makes changing it more than twice as hard

> InnerSource Commons is the world's largest community of InnerSource practitioners

and how big is that? five? ten?

this is a zero-content advert.

It's pretty popular amongst larger enterprises and financial institutions.

I guess the practice is common (I have worked in such contexts in the past - no issue with the idea, although you'd be hard pressed to find a manager that understood the need for maintainer time, or maintainers in general in products).

However, the linked site is extremely misleading. I had to click 3 links and watch a video just to make sure what the website was about, and in the end I was surprised it's not some kind of scam to sell consulting. I'm still not convinced tbh.

It's been a while since I've actually read the site; I'll admit it's quite vague.

The main thing worth reading, imo, is this ebook from 2015. The rest looks like a lot of hot air.

https://innersourcecommons.org/learn/books/getting-started-w...

Haha, Inner Source. I see this at a particular client of ours. They use it as a way for teams to dodge change/bugfix requests. They say “oh yeah just create a pull request” and then simply not review it if you actually dare. The non-hostile take is of course if you’re too busy to consider the change request you are also too busy to review the pull request. Not sure if working on PRs is incentivized at all.

So is it about trying to mimic what the free software devs do and hope that it will provide the same outcome? Sounds like dressing like your favorite rock star to try to play guitar better.

Wow, this site reads like an engineering-focused clone of https://web.archive.org/web/20050131093151/http://www.mintru....

This is hilarious. Thank you for sharing.

so this is "shots across the bow" for the Enterprise push to disembowel Libre software?

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