How to talk customers into creating Open Source and what you need to know about IPR

Why should we care about open sourcing anything?

Basically, you are paying for the contributions of the developer(s) involved, but you get more with the same money.

And, you will be able to benefit from the new features and bug fixes that land on the open source project from the other users.

Open source software is eating the world

The forerunners of digital services are creating more and more open source. Software development is not commodity, but the basic building blocks of making great services are:

• Cloud platforms such as Heroku and Amazon Web Services
• Open data APIs
• Open source components

It is very essential that we are not re-inventing the wheel but instead building on and contributing to the open source projects.

Examples of some forerunners are

• Microsoft
• Walmart
• Zalando
• New York Times

Giving back is good PR

Developers want to build things that they can use themselves

By embracing the open source community you are able to attract good developers

Participating in open source community is the best platform to learn development, teamwork, communication and it all builds up for your CV

You can and you should use the PR. We do it as well.

OK, sounds good, but what does it mean in terms of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)?

As always, everything we develop for you, remains your intellectual property.

By agreeing to publish open source you are giving other people the permission to use the project within the license terms. We favour a permissive license such as MIT or Apache. They enable you and others to modify the code for commercial purposes without requiring them to contribute back.

So how are you going to make all this happen?

Basically you just need to decide what is the visibility you wish to have:

1. You retain all of your IPR and your company name is mentioned in the copyright clause together with Futurice and others – you get the PR as well
2. If you wish, you can transfer your IPR to us and we can mention you in the contributors – you still get the PR
3. If you wish to not be mentioned, you can transfer the IPR to us and we don't have to mention you in any way – then you really are not getting the PR out of this

This is very interesting but I'm still very confused

Please do come talk to us, our Social responsibility lead Teemu Turunen can help you understand it all and consult you in the open source jungle.