On Tue, Mar 19, 2002 at 09:20:22AM -0000, Clayton, Nik [IT] wrote: >So I'm writing some (hopefully) fairly useful Perl modules at $dayjob, and >want to release them to the outside world. I suspect this is going to be >a novelty to the corporate lawyers. > >Has anyone here had experience of doing this sort of thing at large >companies, >and making the arguments for open source'ing your code? Any war stories, or >tips you can pass on?
My tack has usually been to get it nailed down before I start coding. But if you haven't, the best arguments I've met are: - there's nothing proprietary to the business in this code; - nor does it give away any business secrets; - therefore having it available doesn't help the competition. - even if the competition decided to use it, you'd still have the original author available; - if it's open-sourced, other people will help improve it while I work on stuff that _is_ specific to the business Saying "it'll get a good reputation with the open source community" is usually not helpful. Go for the greed... R
