
Ask: Why would you open source all your company's software? - outtolunch
What can really be open-sourced in a company when it comes to dealing with customer data in it&#x27;s services?
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StudentStuff
Everything short of the customer data can be opened up, and even then the
customer data can often be partially scrubbed and then shared for the benefit
of all your customers.

One example was a Point of Sale system I worked on, we were able to simplify
adding new products by creating a community database of UPC/other barcode
formats that would have the name, description and other attributes of an item
along with an average price. Very useful way to creatively transform this
data, and help our clients do less work while accomplishing more.

With regard to opening proprietary code, we did a few credit/debit/EBT
integrations, and one of the best choices made was to release our code and do
development in the open.

When working with each vendor we could highlight exactly where our code was
running into issues with their buggy hardware, and we were able to create
straightforward non-NDAed documentation for these devices, which helped other
projects that never had credit/debit integration. Additionally, our
competitors didn't even end up fixing the bugs we highlighted in our
documentation, I really thought they'd at least try to be a bit more
competitive/feature complete.

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juzffoo
Would you mind sharing a link to the open source code you are referring to?
especially the shared item data? Thanks!

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zzo38computer
Open source the software (in my opinion, you should release all of the code
under a GPL compatible license (or public domain)), but not the contents of
the databases that include private data (although the database schemas may be
made available, and, depending what you are doing, maybe also the contents of
the sqlite_stat1 table (or the equivalent for other database systems) if you
are willing to include that information). Databases containing public data
should be made available though, if you have such thing.

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verdverm
I've seen it happen when a company decides to close it's doors.

Assuming you mean an active company, a lot can be open source that deals with
customer data, because their data is not in the source code. At Hofstadter, we
are open sourcing some today with a plan to open source our core tool. There
is a path for a gradual transition. We also have some projects in the works
that will form our always free tier and become open sourced early in their
life. OSS is important to us for many reasons, one is that we have benefited a
lot from them, another is our focus on developers.

