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

Hmm

[killmenow]

Aside from your wholesale copying and posting of the entire article here---a move which undoubtedly oversteps the bounds of fair use---I will merely point you to this article on Groklaw in which I think PJ deftly points out the the errors in the Economist article, thereby leaving me with little else to say but: troll much?

Re:Enterprise

[Knightman]

There is one good reason for defining keywords as string constants is that if you later misspell any of them you get a compile error instead of going "WTF?" and wonder why your sql-statement doesn't return the expected data.

Ie, if you do it right it is an elegant solution to catch spelling errors which otherwise might go unnoticed, if you do it the wrong way you get unreadable code.

Yes, but in a different way

[techno-vampire]

Back in '84-'85, I did some work with a genius programmer, the late Daniel J. Alderson. We were at JPL, so everything was public domain, which is as open source as you can get. As I worked with him, I watched what he did and how, and that taught me good coding practices that I've used to this day.

As an example, take a look at the functions in the standard I/O library for C. The various scanf() and prinf() variations use much the same arguments, but each one has them in a different order. There's no rhyme or reason to it, you either have to memorize the order or look it up. Not so with the functions Dan wrote! Part of his planning for a subroutine/function package was deciding what order the arguments would go in, and they were in exactly that order every time. (Many of the routines used either the same set of arguments, or a subset of them.) I was working with him because he'd gone blind from diabetes, and in all the time we worked on that package, he never got the arguments wrong because he'd planned it out ahead of time. In this case, there were only three functions that the average user'd need, and the rest were helpers for them. Still, if anybody needed them, they were there, and easy to use.

Now, imagine if this code were being used in a current OSS project. (Unlikely; not only is it in FORTRAN, the problem it solved had to do with command lines and batch files, mostly on a VAX.) Not only would it be easy to use, it'd be easy for somebody else to check the calls and make sure everything was in the right order. Sanity checks become quicker and there are less obscure bugs caused by misordered arguments. He also kept his variable delcarations alphabatized, as well as keeping his functions (except main() of course) in alphabetical order. Made it much easier to find the one you wanted, I can assure you.

Re:Open source is NOT about profit!!!

[jericho4.0]

"That's why accepting money for writing software that will be GPL'd is seriously frowned upon by FOSS advocates."

If by "FOSS advocates", you mean "FOSS advocates who still live in Moms basement". The GPL is about freedom, yes, but is not anti money.