I look at that and see no reason why an organization shouldn’t be able to have those same benefits for the code they have in-house that they are not wanting to “open source”. I have found that there is a community that is dedicated to this very concept, inner source. Inner-source is a culture and process movement to facilitate collaboration among development teams. Similar to open source, although it only pertains to private repositories within the organization. As we see open source becoming more prevalent in our industry many organizations are taking notice of the collaborative process involved. It isn’t possible for all software written to be open source for all organizations, but why should those organizations and private projects not benefit from open source concepts.
- Facilitate transparency amongst all development teams in the organization.
- Reduce the dependency issues on other teams by submitting MR’s for review to the dependent projects as needed.
- Breaking down silos
- Accelerate cross-project learning
- Improved documentation
- Process standardization
- Foster innovation
- Release passion and creativity
- Conflict with “day” job as developers may decide to spend more time on other projects than those their team owns.
- Silos may not fully break down
- https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/innersource/
- https://resources.github.com/whitepapers/introduction-to-innersource/
- http://paypal.github.io/InnerSourceCommons/assets/files/AdoptingInnerSource.pdf
- https://medium.com/swlh/inner-source-b6c9e73cb8dc
From the reading and talks, it seems there are a set of basic needs a project must fulfill to facilitate inner source.
- Defined Ownership within projects
- Good Review process
- Good Documentation
- Automated testing
- Coding Standards
- Code Quality Checks
- A policy of allowing developers to submit MR’s to other projects (especially those their products rely on).
- A manner of introducing the different projects in the company to the developers.
- A way to foster participation
- have something of value to share?
- is there a strategic decision policy in place?
- are you ready for doing open source? (capability, culture, governing, etc)
I would like to hear from everyone in the comments their thoughts on this topic.
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