GitHub For Dummies

Chapter 11

Inner-Source Your Code on GitHub

IN THIS CHAPTER

Creating a GitHub organization

Setting up teams

Understanding inner-source best practices

Chapters 9 and 10 talk about the open source community and best practices on GitHub.com. But if you want to keep your code private, GitHub offers unlimited private repositories for free, personal plans to support your private software development.

In this chapter, you discover some situations where you may want to code in private. You also get the inside scoop on inner-sourcing your code.

Why Code in Private?

If we’re appropriately representing the open source community, you may be inclined to do everything in the public. But what if you work at a company on proprietary code? What if you’re starting a new company where you plan on selling software? Or, what if you’re a student, and you’re working on a group coding assignment? These are examples of when it may be appropriate to work in a private, collaborative environment, when it may be appropriate to inner-source your code.

Inner-sourcing is really just a play on words with open source. It implies that you will use the same (or similar) strategies to collaborative code writing ...