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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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Nowadays every new engineer wants to contribute to open source.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Non-technical management is typically a red flag.
Boss: "I'm not sure..."
Dev: "It's free."
Boss: "Sold."
It's really hard to argue with what amounts to vanity. I didn't take the job.
https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/service-standard/point-12-...