I'd encourage you to do it anyway. We're on the same journey at my company. Some of our product is based on a fairly large and active open source project. Others are much more limited and simply at the "here's the code, have fun" stage.
There's different levels of "open source" (everything from one-way code dumps to full-on maintained-as-a-whole-distributed-global-team). In my experience, it's easier to start with a simple "here's the code, bug reports welcome". This starting point is generally an easier sell to management who's worried about project management taking too much time away from other work.
Like all things, practice, start small, and grow from there. Get's easier as you go. But yeah--licenses/legal, written policies, governance, marketing, time prioritization, and more all take a lot of time to figure out.
NB: My own background in open source biases me to thinking open source is "easy". It's not; it takes a lot of work. The good news is that there's a lot of tools and help available for anyone wanting to start.
There's different levels of "open source" (everything from one-way code dumps to full-on maintained-as-a-whole-distributed-global-team). In my experience, it's easier to start with a simple "here's the code, bug reports welcome". This starting point is generally an easier sell to management who's worried about project management taking too much time away from other work.
Like all things, practice, start small, and grow from there. Get's easier as you go. But yeah--licenses/legal, written policies, governance, marketing, time prioritization, and more all take a lot of time to figure out.
NB: My own background in open source biases me to thinking open source is "easy". It's not; it takes a lot of work. The good news is that there's a lot of tools and help available for anyone wanting to start.