Finding Opportunities to Open Source

There are so many good reasons to open source code.

• Gain contributions from the wider community
• Contribute back for all the awesome you’ve gotten from Open Source
• To build the status of yourself or your company
• Attract the best programmers
• Get public feedback on the quality of your software
• More people will use your software
• open source reusable components actually get reused
• Attract clients

With those great benefits for putting more open source code out there it still seems like a hard sale. Business types don’t always see the benefit to putting time and money into creating something only to turn around and give it away. “HEY!” they say “that’s valuable intellectual property”.

As developers we know the value of producing more open source code.  It is our job to convey that message as best we can to our clients, whether they be internal or external clients.

How do you identify part of a project that is a good candidate to open source?  Here’s the best criteria:

• It’s not unique to the core business (ie Google shouldn’t open source their search engine)
• It should be something that has some re-useability for other people or future projects
• Should be small and single purpose.
• It should be easy to understand and explain
• Ideally it should be a package (cocoapod, gem, pypi, etc), or a service

If you are given a project and asked to design it’s architecture, estimate the cost or otherwise create an implementation plan you should take a moment to consider if there is any pieces of the project that could or should be made open source.  Isolating and open sourcing should add very little relative cost (you would have had to implement the functionality anyway) and you get the benefits of publishing open source mentioned earlier.  Try to up sell your client on open sourcing parts of their project.

In many cases open sourcing a piece of a larger project may be the best business decision to make.  MBA types just won’ t have an easy time grasping that concept so it could be a hard sell, but it’s often worth pushing for.

Keep a mindful eye and suggest an open source strategy on your next project.  You, your client and the wider community all benefit when new code is open sourced.