In most companies the single largest cost is human resources. However, by leveraging Open Source intelligently, you can significantly reduce this cost, by literally having the entirety of GitHub’s user base, working for « free » for your company. This of course is a bit like what investors refers to as « China math », but GitHub has 65 million registered user accounts, most of whom we must assume are developers one way or another. If you intelligently structure your organisation around GitHub, there is literally nothing preventing you from using every single one of these developers as your own company’s resource, making you a million times more productive than mega corporations such as Amazon, Facebook, and Microsoft – For a millionth of the cost these mega corporations are paying. But first let’s illustrate the problem, such that the solution becomes clear …
The problem
In one of my previous jobs somebody had cloned an open source git repository, then added its code to our own private corporate cloud’s git repositories, for then to start modifying the thing (the horror!) 2 years later it took one of my developers 6 weeks to update the thing to use the latest version as created by its main developer on GitHub, trying to keep as many of our own customisations as possible in the process. Needless to say, but I was furious about the original decision, due to having responsibilities for code quality at this company.
