| I don't think "not widely used internally anymore" is a common rationale for open sourcing something. Generally I'd expect companies to open source things when it's proven itself internally and they want to reap the benefits of open source: - Make internal engineers happy - engineers like having their code released outside the bounds of their company - Prestige, which can help with hiring - External contributions (not even code necessarily, just feedback from people who are using it can be amazingly useful for improving the software) - Ability to hire people in the future who already know important parts of your technical stack, and don't need internal training on it - Externally produced resources that help people learn how to use the software (tutorials, community discussion forums etc) If the software is no longer used internally, open sourcing it is MORE expensive - first you have to get through the whole process of ensuring the code you are releasing can be released (lots of auditing, legal reviews etc), and then you'll have to deal with a flow of support requests which you can either deal with (expensive, especially if your internal knowledge of the tool is atrophying) or ignore (expensive to your reputation). |
If your open source project/protocol is the most popular, and you have the governance over it, then you decide where it goes. Chromium is open source, but Google controls it, and everyone who depends on it has to follow. If Chromium was not open source, maybe Firefox would be more popular, and Google would not have control over that.
> or ignore (expensive to your reputation).
I don't think that anything is expensive for Google. They can do whatever they want.