Getting Started with InnerSource

Chapter 1. A Robust Approach to Team Collaboration

Inspired by the spread of open source software throughout the areas of operating systems, cloud computing, JavaScript frameworks, and elsewhere, a number of companies are mimicking the practices of the powerful open source movement to create an internal company collaboration under the rubric InnerSource. In these pages, you’ll read about the experience of the leading Internet commerce facilitator PayPal and see how InnerSource can benefit engineers, management, and marketing/PR departments.

To understand the appeal of InnerSource project management, consider what has made open source software development so successful:

• Programmers share their work with a wide audience, instead of just with a manager or team. In most open source projects, anyone in the world is free to view the code, comment on it, learn new skills by examining it, and submit changes that they think will improve it or customize it to their needs.
• New code repositories (branches) based on the project can be made freely, so that sites with unanticipated uses for the code can adapt it. There are usually rules and technical support for remerging different branches into the original master branch.
• People at large geographical distances, at separate times, can work on the same code or contribute different files of code to the same project.
• Communication tends to be written and posted to public sites instead of shared informally by word of mouth, which provides a history ...