Red Hat to Coax Code Contributions From Companies

Stony Stevenson writes "New Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst has hit out at enterprises, bemoaning that billions of dollars are wasted each year because 95% of companies won't share code. Speaking at the Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, he said his company must take a larger role in urging enterprises to participate in open source projects and, in some cases, coax code contributions out of companies that have made in-house improvements. He now feels Red Hat should lead the way 'It should be part of Red Hat's job to define development in a new way, and get companies to work together' on shared projects, he said. The joint development projects would be designed to cover non-competitive parts of an industry, with individual companies still focused on their own competitive business applications."

coax yes coerce no

[davidwr]

Perhaps a better word would be to encourage or evangelize. Coercion should have no place in business and the word coax can mean either to benignly encourage or to coerce.

Transifex

[Nushio]

Disclaimer: I am currently a Fedora Translator

Fedora currently uses Transifex, which makes all translations go Upstream, thus sharing what we've translated, with other Software Projects.

Re:Job loss

[Metaphorically]

There's a big difference between a few implementations existing to meet different needs (or even the same needs) and the thousands of times that the same software is built for in-house solutions (because "our situation is unique"). There's plenty of good bug-tracking software out there but I know that there are also tons of Excel spreadsheets being extended to track bugs. Many of those spreadsheets have coders looking at them and telling their bosses "we should build our own issue tracking software to replace this spreadsheet."

That sort of thing happens and will keep happening. That doesn't mean that we need to have artificial barriers stopping companies from sharing code to keep those coders employed (as the GP suggested). If code is shared then there's a chance to reuse pieces or at least look at it and decide if it's suitable for another need. When it's not shared then it stays in it's buggy little corner and the same in-house coders keep tweaking it every time it breaks.

Until all code is truly reusable and free of everything non-problem-related, programmers will reinvent the wheel over and over again.

Don't hold your breath.