Engineering wants to open-source our CLI tooling. Legal/compliance reviews add 3-6 months overhead. Is the developer goodwill and recruiting boost worth the ongoing maintenance commitment?
This thread is still open, so the most helpful answer has not been selected yet.
Good question - this is one of those decisions that looks simple from the outside but has serious downstream implications. The maintenance tax argument is real but often overstated. What matters more is the bus factor and governance overhead of open-sourcing something that was never designed for external consumption. Three things to check before deciding: 1. Does the tool have any hardcoded internal URLs, auth patterns, or environment-specific config? If yes, the refactoring cost alone may outweigh the recruiting benefit. 2. Who owns the issue tracker, PR reviews, and release process post-open-source? The team is not an answer - you need a named maintainer with allocated time. 3. What is your CLA strategy? Even for a simple tool, you need a contribution agreement if you want to relicense or dual-license later. On the recruiting side: open-source tools do attract talent, but only if the project has visible activity (regular releases, responsive maintainers, clear contribution guidelines). A dormant repo with 50 stars is worse than no repo at all. We went open-source with our internal scaffolding tool last year. The recruiting bump was real (roughly 15 percent increase in inbound engineering interest), but the maintenance overhead was about 4 hours per week - which we did not budget for. Factor that in.