Flipping the Bozo Bit
Keith Irwin & Christoph Neumann

Episode 9: Internalizing Open Source

2013-07-15

What if you ran your internal, closed-source, proprietary, mega-corporate projects like open source projects? Similar styles? Similar tools?

In This Episode:

  • First step in a software project? Meetings!
  • But, but … what if we run internal projects like they were open source projects?
  • Submitting patches to company projects, no matter where they are.
  • IT departments: The people who say no.
  • Internal utility projects? Or open source product products?
  • Skunkworxing
  • Pretending internally focussed apps are open source apps.
  • The expensive barrier of entry for official projects.
  • You can’t backlog an exploration.
  • Feudalism and the company ownership of your skills.
  • Toyota and the kanban thing.
  • The Blue Ocean Notion
  • Engineers, the trolls in the back room.
  • The economy of getting things done.
  • The meritocracy of things that work.
  • We won’t discuss the merits of hard copy RSS.
  • Open source repos as a way to avoid executive escalation.
  • Branching another org’s project if they won’t play ball.
  • An application built on two power structures.
  • Babylonian dating service vs the dart method.
  • Multiple project owners does not a happy project make.
  • Super-printer-mega-comm vs printer chat.
  • The economy of utility vs the economy of power.
  • Dark Net: the response to authoritarianism.
  • XMPP: It’s not a Best Practice on the Best Practice Blog
  • Doing development on the sly is best done using open source development tools.
  • The Resistance? Their office hours are posted here.
  • When you’re not being managed, you end up using open source techniques when you want to get things done.
  • Writing software professionally vs writing software as a professional.
  • The chains are in our minds.
  • In the open source world, you get to be Apple and say “no”.
  • You go underground so you can, eventually, go above ground.
  • Digging a trench around managers so they can’t help but fall where you want.
  • Do you have to be an open-source kind of person?
  • What if the engineering director forced open-source by fiat?
  • Differently motivated developers.
  • Developers and software as a continuum. Or the chasm. Or something.
  • Aunt Mabel, Designer Intuition and the Ophthalmologist
  • Story points as a measure of reluctance.
  • Slides vs prototype, forced buy-in vs peer persuasion.

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