Inner Source

Bringing open source practices into an enterprise

Froilán Irizarry Rivera

2022-05-12

What is inner source 🤔

InnerSource is the use of open source software development best practices and the establishment of an open source-like culture within organizations for the development of its non-open-source and/or proprietary software.

History side note

Tim O’Reilly coined the term in 2000 👀

So it’s taken a while to catch on

Let’s break it down

Open Source software development practices

Publicly accessible

source control (GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket)
bug/task list
community or communication channels

The first group of practices revolves around public accessibility, or can people that are not a part of the project or effort get to it freely.

This access impact three main things:

Is the source control system that the project uses accessible to the public. I feel it’s important to specify a VCS and not default to a folder somewhere on the internet. The practice of the community is to have version control at the forefront of our projects.
Is the bug or task list accessible. An important part for a open source project to have publicly available. This is the only clear way people outside of the project can know where a project needs help and where to report any issues.
Last but not least, community. This is a bit more “whatever works” for the maintainers. Many open source project default to have a community around them and have communications or the core team public.

contributor and community guidance

documentation
how to contribute
code of conduct
WYSIWYG / as is

Open Source-like culture

The embrace of openness and free exchange of ideas to push a community’s creativity and innovation to solve problems

What does that mean for us

collaboration

openness

Repo visibility

To be able to collaborate on a repository we first need to be able to see it and submit contributions to it. Repository visibility is one of the low hanging fruits that any enterprise can change today.

An internal repository is a repo that can be accessed by anybody that is a member of the GitHub enterprise org. The default access is of read but could be changed to write. This will enable everybody to contribute to a repo in the form of a pull request.

It will also let private repositories fulfill their roles as a private space for any sensitive needs.

A private repository is a repo that will only be viewable to the creator, teams or individuals that are granted access to it, and the GitHub enterprise org admins.

Private repositories can be used just as internal repos and default access can be granted through the enterprise settings but this creates unneeded friction and overhead to repo owners in the management of repo access.

governance

Implementing

READMEs
CONTRIBUTING.md files
code of conduct (important for any public facing open source projects)
CODEOWNERS files
branch protections

community

Resources

The What	The Where
Inner Source Commons	https://innersourcecommons.org/
Inner Source Commons YouTube	https://www.youtube.com/c/InnerSourceCommons
Wikipedia	https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_source
GitHub’s take on Inner Source	https://resources.github.com/innersource/fundamentals/
GitLab’s take on Inner Source	https://about.gitlab.com/topics/version-control/what-is-innersource/