Internal Resources

Consider what you might have to do in a regular corporation to opensource a product:

• Hire (or retask) a system administrator with experience in a large range of different products (issue tracking, version control, content management, web servers, operating systems)
• Lease or buy a suitable server for the opensource project
• Install the operating system and various products that you will be using
• Configure all the products for their initial use
• Secure the environment
• Backup the environment
• Have the security group verify that the environment will be suitably secure (even in your DMZ, it's important to maintain a secure operating environment)
• Have the IT group change the firewall rules to let in a whole raft of new protocols (IRC, NNTP, ssh, cvs, etc). If you've ever had to do this before, you'll know how difficult this can be
• Maintain the environment 24x7 (having limited 8x5 support in a globally distributed opensource project is one way to alienate remote developers)
• Manage your community using one-off scripts, manual inspection of logs and cobbled together solutions