Free and Open Source Software

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I don't get why big companys are afraid of open source software (feddit.it)

submitted 1 year ago by da_g@feddit.it to c/foss@beehaw.org

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I don't get why big companys are afraid of open source software.

I know that monetizing open source is hard but in exchange they would have 8 billion programmers ready, for free!

Even if they do like redhat , as controversial as it is right now, they would be better off than just closing the source.

I would be willing to pay to have the license to modify my own software even if I couldn't redistribute it afterwards.

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[–] recursiveturtle@beehaw.org 6 points 1 year ago

To add to another comment, my company is not really afraid of it, but the amount of overhead needed to contribute to OSS projects is very high here. Basically, we have to ensure that we are releasing clean, well documented code, with proper contribution guides, that a person here can “own” with updates. Any code beyond bug fixes we push would have to be approved beyond our normal code review process. We don’t want to have our Junior Intern Dev start pushing code publicly that makes our code look bad…. Or our senior devs hah.

Finally, GPL makes things tricky for us, as we take the license seriously. We tend to release code in a more permissive license for that reason, and actively try to use MIT/BSD for that purpose. So we have to be careful, and it is much much easier to just not release code into the wild.

Oh and for new projects, we have to justify why we should make them publicly OSS - will it actually benefit the community in some way?