Why companies should let employees represent them
I've helped a lot of companies write open source software policies. The one thing that surprises me the most is the number of companies that require that their companies use an anonymous email address, i.e. google or yahoo, to interact with the community. I try to explain why this is a bad idea. Today I had a conversation with Jeremy Allison, the maintainer of Samba, who explained it really well.
Jeremy said when Samba gets a request from an anonymous individual, they send them a work around and add the problem to the queue. When they get a request from a large company, they drop everything to help them. By helping one large company or vendor they know they are fixing a problem that thousands of users will see.
I have a regular day-job at a company that isn’t particularly clueful or enthusiastic about open source, but I can tell you that I *choose* to interact with the community with my own personal email address and NOT my corporate address.
The reasons are mostly so that
1) I don’t have to suffer through inquisitions at work, if they happen to stumble across the corporate name being used for something they don’t understand
2) If I ever leave, I want credit/feedback etc to come back to me, and that is out of the question if I do stuff under the email they give me.
3) They just don’t get opensource to begin with. The community is better off without them.