Giving Back to the Community
I read William Hurley's post on giving back to the open source community. He makes a good point.
There are too many entities taking advantage of open source technology without giving back. Some are literally pillaging the community that butters their bread. How long before we all suffer the effects? If major project contributors were to stop work, how would that affect the industry as a whole?
That got me thinking about the different ways that companies can give back to the community. Contribute code or bug fixes
- Test and report bugs
- Write documentation
- Hire community members
- Pay community members for services or consulting work around the project
- Give money to open source projects or foundations
- Provide technical tools/resources for communities to use
- Help communities to spread the word about their projects
- Provide free services (legal, web, etc) to the community
Sometimes people only think about donating code, but there are a myriad of ways to give back. We've used at least four of these ways at OpenLogic and are always looking for new ideas.
