8.5. InnerSource: Open-Source Principles Inside Organizations
The name suggests a contradiction — "open source" that isn't public — but that's exactly the point.
💡 First Principle: InnerSource applies open-source collaboration practices — broad internal visibility, documented contribution workflows, cross-team discoverability — to code that remains entirely proprietary and never leaves the company. What's borrowed from open source isn't the license or the public availability; it's the working model: any team inside the company can discover, read, and propose changes to another team's internal repository, the same way an external contributor would engage with a public open-source project.
⚠️ Exam Trap: InnerSource does not make code public or open source in the licensing sense — the code stays entirely proprietary. What changes is internal visibility and contribution workflow, not who outside the company can access it.
Reflection Question: A company adopts InnerSource so any internal team can propose changes to any other team's repository. Does that mean those repositories are now open source? Why or why not?
