Writing the puzzle.opnsense Ansible collection

We are a company with employees whose salaries have to get paid. To do so, we provide services for customers for which we charge a fee. So how can we justify writing an open-source Ansible collection, and how did we meet the challenge of working for customers and maintaining an open-source project?

Organization

Our team members work on different projects for different customers on different days. This leads to the challenge in finding time slots where every contributor could take part. We established a very short status update meeting where every available contributor takes part. The information shared in this meeting feeds into a protocol that anyone has access to at any time. This enabled us to proactively bring employees back on board who had been absorbed in customer projects for a longer period of time. Further, our company has “open source days,” where we are encouraged to work on open source projects. We used these days to work on our Ansible collection.

Find your Budget

Despite all the open-source days, we have to maintain a certain economic efficiency. That’s why we searched for budgetary pots we can make use of. We have budgets for innovation projects, for infrastructure, and for training of the employees. Creating an Ansible collection is an innovation; it’s part of the infrastructure, and it also supports the further development of the employees. That’s why we were able to get time to work on the collection from the responsible budget managers.

Culture

In addition to financial considerations, there are also cultural points that speak in favor of the development of the Ansible collection. Since the foundation of our company, open source has been a central part of our work. Our employees support open source and like the idea of shared knowledge. We also expect to make savings in the longer term because we will save time in operating the devices and configuring them. Last but not least is the development of Python knowledge. It will probably also mean that we will be able to offer our customers additional services with this knowledge.

Conclusion

We hope that our experience of how to justify the development of open source software in a market environment will help many other companies to implement open source projects. If you are interested in contributing, we appreciate any collaboration in our puzzle.opnsense Ansible collection!