Inner Source Project Management is the name given to the adoption of common practices in Open Source projects by any company. It implies assimilating characteristics of an Open Source project without really being it, fulfilling the requirements that all development has within a company.
It is an approach that opens the possibility to any member of the organization to embark on it, as it can happen in typical Open Source communities, but the result is a product whose owner is the company and its code is not free: only the workers of the organization can access it. The idea is that any member of the business can contribute to the project, the final result being a closed product.
Reasons to bet on Inner Source projects
There are many advantages to adopting this model:
- The recycling or reuse of code, which is stored in a common repository within the organization, and can be used in any other project.
- The quality of the final result, being able to count on a great number of people and the continuous revisions carried out favour the improvement of the product.
- The improvement in the speed of any development by the members of the organization, since they use common tools and code in this project that can later be used in others within the organization.
- The learning and transmission of knowledge in the mass of developers since the whole company collaborates and contributes.
- The objective of the project can be something that the whole company will benefit from (an operating system, an application, a tool), which makes the economic value within the organization and the knowledge generated very high.
