reuse
Matt,
Your concept on open source within the firewall is a bit unclear. Promoting re-use of good stuff around the broader enterprise to save money and avoid fragmentation = a good thing. This approach used to be called "reuse" and is largely orthogonal to private/oss licensing. e.g. reuse CICS death to TPF, reuse Apache web server death to IIS.
Infamously enterprise reuse (as opposed to more local kinds) was declared bunk by an old BT CTO which may well have been true for his time and place. It is certainly difficult to achieve across P&L areas in big corporates and away from infrastructure topics. Creating sustainable (5-10yr+) models for your own code - maintaining traction on adoption/upgrade and allowing technical renewal is difficult mostly because of community size/people and business project governance issues. Licensing approach doesn't feel like the primary issue within the firewall.
What in your view - does recasting the local "common code" as open source within the firewall add that drives business area / project adoption or helps sustainability ?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
