How Has Open Source Helped You Commercially?

Slithe asks: "In the past few years, OSS has proven that sharing one's source code can be beneficial to both businesses and their customers. More than a few young programmers are thankful that they were allowed to learn from professional developers by browsing through and hacking on 'enterprise quality' code. My question to developers of commercial OSS is this: Have you, personally, ever benefited from having the source code to your project freely available and dowloadable, instead of being kept under lock-and-key? Have you ever fixed a bug in your spare time? Have you ever sought outside help (providing source code snippets) on a particularly nasty problem?"

Comments

open source got me LAID!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, just kidding, actually it didn't. Sorry to get your hopes "up".

Re:open source got me LAID!

[Anonymous Coward]

Got me laid. 'Tis a true story.

I'm a web developer. Mostly PHP, MySQL/PostgreSQL, etc. When I get my nice heafty pay-cheque from whomever I do a project for, I go out and pickup a hooker or two. ;-)

-- if only it was that easy. :-(

Enterprise

[dcapel]

I'm glad I can learn from such quality enterprise code as this:

http://thedailywtf.com/forums/64597/ShowPost.aspx
http://thedailywtf.com/forums/64833/ShowPost.aspx

Excerpt for the lazy:

public class SqlWords
{
    public const string SELECT = " SELECT ";
    public const string TOP = " TOP ";
    public const string DISTINCT = " DISTINCT ";
    public const string FROM = " FROM ";
    public const string INNER = " INNER ";
    public const string JOIN = " JOIN ";
    public const string INNER_JOIN = " INNER JOIN ";
    public const string LEFT = " LEFT ";
}

Re:Enterprise

[DrSkwid]

Yeah, I can see why you'd think that approach was much less error prone !

sql = sprintf("%s col1, col2, col3, %s tab1 %s %s tab2 ON tab1.pk=tab2.pk %s col1=%d and col2 in (%s %s fkey %s tab3 %s col4=3);", SELECT, FROM, LEFT, JOIN, WHERE, 1, SELECT, DISTINCT, FROM, WHERE);

res = PQexec(sql);

> if you do it the wrong way you get unreadable code

come on then, show me an improvement

Open Source has made my life way easier

[urikkiru]

I work for [CENSORED*], and we use the open source app [CENSORED*] by snagging it's source, modifying it a bit, and then deploying it internally, and only internally.(We don't distribute it outside of the company, so there is no one to whom we would have to give out our source to) This allows us to [CENSORED*] the [CENSORED*], and get [CENSORED*] on [CENSORED*]. It's a profitable business, as you can tell.

* These censored bits brought to you by men in black coats, and my NDA. Enjoy!

Re:Open Source has made my life way easier

[Morrigu]

Everyone over here at [CENSORED*] agrees. We love using [CENSORED*] and [CENSORED*] and it's saved us loads of time and money compared to commercial solutions like [CENSORED*]. Plus our customers at [CENSORED*] like how it [CENSORED*], and the way it does [CENSORED*] too. Everybody's happy!

* Sorry, can't tell you why it's censored. Talk to [CENSORED*] if you want more info.

It's been great, commercial-ly

[LightningBolt!]

I use MythTV, the open source Tivo thing. It lets me skip commercials, so I'd say it's helped out, commercially.

Hoo ah. Tough crowd.

I'm SCO - I benefitted a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

It appears all the line-for-line code between SCO stuff and Linux is actually stuff stolen *from* Linux, not *by* Linux - so I guess we at SCO benefitted from open source snippets, but my leagal team won't let me admit it yet.

Insincerely, Darly McBride

True story!

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, aMSN really got me laid once the webcam plugin was integrated. That's how I met my girlfriend and then... well, you don't want to know :p Thank you aMSN and keep up the good work!