Will Corporate Open Source Get Laid Off?
Earlier this week, I was investigating a new open-source system. This was not just a library but a real system, substantial and something you could at least attempt to charge enterprise money for. It was developed and sponsored by an American company, one you have definitely heard of, albeit not one of the FAANG’s. So I wondered about its viability. Why?
In the face of an economic downturn, focus on profitability, and rising layoffs, it’s reasonable to expect that tech company executives and managers will start to question how many engineering resources are being dedicated to open source work.
We should examine the reasons why many corporations over the last 10 or 15 years have been supportive of employees working open source as part of their day job:
It’s good for recruiting engineers.
It helps the company’s reputation in the industry.
The project can get outside help, particularly on bug fixes and usually for free.
It’s not clear to me that these conditions continue to hold throughout a tech downturn.
As much as certain VCs and investors would like it to happen, it’s certainly not the case that every tech company will pull a Twitter and lay off 50% of its engineering team overnight. But for the purposes of this discussion, let’s go with that for a minute. At a minimum, 50% of that company’s open source contribution would disappear immediately.
In reality, it would be a lot higher than 50%, as the remaining engineering resources will have to focus more on the core business. Open source projects are usually not core to the business, but rather fundamental infrastructure that can be bought instead of built, or run with deferred maintenance and enhancement. In other words, stuff that’s easy to cut.
Ironically, the open source projects that are most likely to thrive in this environment are exactly the ones that often annoy open source advocates — specifically, projects that are nominally open source but primarily only usable as commercialized SaaS and cloud service offerings.
Have you seen this dynamic playing out in practice yet? Reach out and let me know!
