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jacobian/why open source django.md

Created July 24, 2013 17:49
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Our arguments for open sourcing Django
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why open source django.md

  1. The code will get better. Linus' Law: "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow": we'll be able to get community contributions and bug reports, and thus the code will grow better faster than we can grow it ourselves. Also, Joy's Law - "No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else": we'll get better code from people who don't work for us than from people who do.

  2. We'll write better code. Wall's 3rd great virtual of a programmer, Hubris: we'll write better code people we don't want other people to say bad things about us. We'll do better with the world watching than with just us.

  3. Increased ability to hire. We're a 19k circ newspaper in a town most people have never heard of. Open source will help put us on the map, make us a place people actually might be interested in working.

  4. When we do hire, we'll be able to hire people who already know (some of) what we do. Decreased onboarding costs makes it easier to ramp up quicker should we need to.

  5. This isn't our business. Are we a company that makes web frameworks? Then why are we maintaining a web framework? Our web framework doesn't provide us with a competetive advantage, so our work maintaining it is just a drag on our bottom line. We can share the maintanance burden of this code with other like-minded companies and individuals, and that'll leave us more time to focus on the things that do matter to our business.

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