Comment by aurumque
4 months ago
When I was a younger man, I fought long and hard and spent many late nights on the phone with the lawyers abroad, to convince my company to open source a tool that I was proud of and thought would help our brand and attract new developers. They finally granted approval, but I was not allowed to accept features or updates, customer service, spend time on fixes, accept pull requests, etc. Unfortunately my name was all over it, and I came to hate the fact that I had championed this, forced to watch the code rot and interest wane because the company couldn't fathom anything OSS besides lobbing some dead code over the wall periodically.
After I left I would still receive emails from frustrated users, but I had no access anymore. I could have forked it, but it just seemed too messy. I made some suggestions and wished them luck.
There is a lesson here, somewhere, but mainly it just convinced me to not rock the boat for the next decade, and to seek out smaller companies for employment.
I think we all have to learn the lesson, when we are young, that forcing people to do something they really don't want rarely ends up going well. You always hope they'll later have some epiphany that you were right, but they almost never really do what you want them to (you wanted them to support the open source project) and even if you were right, they'll rarely figure that out.
Given the energy, time and willingness I'd just develop it as an anon collaborator like yournamescrambled@email