Ask HN: Does your company have an open source release policy? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Does your company have an open source release policy?

16 pointsGauntletWizard4 comments

I'm working with some fairly new technology (k8s). There's a lot of simple things that can be done with a few minutes work. I've already got a blanket signoff to contribute to upstream repos, but today I found something that would work best if I release a new repo. I'd like to do it from a corporate perspective, because I think it would be good citizenship, however, we don't have a general policy for how public releases are managed.

Does your company have a general open source release policy? Does it include different patterns for contributing to an existing project, vs creating a new project? What about small vs. large projects; i.e. a small module for common use (leftpad) vs a larger project expecting a community (tools like Envoy, Kubernetes)

If there's examples of open source policies we could simply adopt, that'd be great, too.

My company has this complicated release process for open source software. You have to have a technical review and then a legal review of the package and then it has to go to committee to be signed off. The software can then be released on a specific channel that I've never ever seen someone mention on the Internet.

I'm pretty sure the public release committee would explode if you described pushing commits to a public repo.

For legal reasons I doubt this will change anytime in the near future.

Doesn't exactly answer the question as stated, and you seem to not be on the same boat - but I'd like to contribute a flipside story for anybody interested:

I tried to get one together at my last job - got all the way through legal approval and okayed by engineering heads and team leads. But - nothing ever got released as an open source project.

Maybe i didn't push enough, but I also sensed there were invisible obstacles in the way.

For anyone in the same boat - push for it!

Our company does. It's a mix of technical review by relevant peers plus a dedicated review committee (mostly looking for good docs and company internals). Then we send it off to legal which is a quick turnaround.

It's a pretty new process and we only have one project out there (https://github.com/rallyhealth/szl), but there's a few projects in review.

With this post, I'm actually thinking the next submission should be our OSS review process and guidelines :)

Google's policy: https://opensource.google.com/docs/

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