Arguments for going open source

Question

I've spent my downtime at work this summer writing a framework of sorts for facilitating my day to day work. In short it loads a xml with markup that defines the blocks of the site, their content and the styling of these (very similar to html), handles the loading of assets and such.

Now I'm rather pleased with how this is turning out, and I've been itching to release some of my code for public use (and scrutiny). I'm also reasonably sure that it fills a void for quick and easy construction of sites (or parts of them).

What would be the best arguments to convince my boss/coworkers that releasing this under an open source license is a good idea?

Answer 1

• Popularity
• Community contribution
• Public scrutiny
• We will be forced to adhere to standards. (which will in turn make the product better)
• Goodwill

Answer 2

I think the crux of the reason that open source is a good idea is because you pool together a LARGE resource of people usually working for free to create something useful and exciting. A site like Digg is churning out more and better stories than the staff @ Slashdot could because the community drives it. So too, could an open source project get more done than a dedicated team IF you have a project exciting enough to draw in participation. There's also many other benefits like improving your code and learning along the way.

Answer 3

Publicity: You could exemplify with the Ruby on Rails framework.

It was created to do the 37signals web apps. They open sourced it, then someone came along and build twitter. Imagine the publicity they had from that!

Answer 4

The OSI has a number of good resources with http://www.opensource.org/advocacy/case_for_business.php probably being the most relevant for you.

There are loads of open source projects and when popular, the best advantage in my opinion is having bug fixes and enhancements contributed back into the project. You tend to only develop the necessary features for the use case at your job (exceptions do exist of course) and it's good to have other people work on other areas of the project.

That said, people will usually only do that if they have a use for the project themselves and raising awareness can be just as hard as marketing a commercial project - you will probably find only a few people use it having stumbled upon the project through an obscure Google search!

As such, whilst there are a lot of development oriented advantages, even if there aren't many (or any) actual users, it looks very good from a business/company perspective that your organisation is supporting the release of internal projects under open source licenses. This shows good things to prospective employees about the openess of the organisation.

So whilst you only get the big open source advantages with scale, there are less obvious ones that start working immediately, namely building a good name for your company.

Answer 5

The most important contribution of making a product open source is that it instantly becomes more accessible for people.

It also helps people who are really interested in your work to see what you have done, make suggestions on improving it and even lend you a hand in doing so sometimes. In addition, you contribute something to the vast repository of open source software and help the community grow and learn in your own small way.

Answer 6

I've released a couple of company-time developed packages as open source. The basic pitch:

It is more profitable or advantageous to the company to release this:

• this package is not part of our core business. We're not giving away the recipe to the secret sauce.
• we will get a bigger body of people exercising the code, finding bugs and thereby increasing the code quality.
• it's likely we can find some people who will contribute code for features that we might find useful.
• good recruiting tool, part 1: good programmers will be attracted to our enlightened developer-friendly organization.
• good recruiting tool, part 2: we can see some people in action who we might be interested in recruiting.

Here's are two standalone packages that were released via this approach:

• http://code.google.com/p/orapig -- pretty recent
• http://sourceforge.net/projects/kap/ -- at my old company