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

Snippet?

[Solemn Bob]

If you know the problem is in a snippet of code, you've already solved the problem.

You may be joking, but Microsoft benefitted

[ron_ivi]

Considering their TCP/IP stack came from BSD, you could say that any network-aware application at Microsoft has its success due directly from open source. So it's very fair to say that the most successful company in the world's most successful products (anything Win95+) has its success due to open source. (And if you think google's more successful than microsoft, they use open source too).

More interesting question

[Loconut1389]

For me, open source has enabled opportunities that wouldn't have existed otherwise- in many ways, but here are a few.

1) I love the stability of RedHat Enterprise Linux and the slower and more careful release schedule, but do not need the tech support- CentOS has been a boon for the organizations I work for.
2) Robust internet services for free running on commodity and inexpensive hardware = less overhead. Who needs a dual xeon 3.0 ghz with registered memory just to run a small DNS or email server? End of lease hardware from tiger direct works great. A 2.4 ghz P4 is still overkill for a lot of things, but for a hundred bucks or so, who can complain.
3) yum in conjunction with RPMs was a godsend for pushing out configurations/software to lab-fulls of identical machines. Simply push out an rpm that requires a package list and voila, yum makes sure that the machines grab those packages and their requirements. This is an oversimplification, but being able to manage several hundred machines with a few keystrokes is a miricle in itself, let alone the fact its free

and many more

Now the more interesting question, how have businesses you've worked for contributed to open source?

I've often found myself working on a commercial project that depends on some open source code either as a dependency or as the framework for expansion. There are many cases where I've fixed show-stopping bugs or contributed new features that enhanced the OSS project in a non-trivial way.

Every time such a situation crops up, it reminds me that OSS and commercialism are not in as much opposition as some in the industry think.

The free time and hobby interest that many have is a huge part of OSS, definately, but commercial interest has produced a heaping pile of very real and sometimes previously very expensive code.

OpenSource has and will continue to revolutionize the growth of knowledge and the capabilities of our machines, as well as lower the learning and creation overhead that is required to run a business. Things that used to take gobs of time to setup and maintain and wouldn't even be worth doing can now be done as an afterthought and an extra. Not to say that OSS replaces admins, but over time, as products improve and manage/configure themselves (rpms, etc) admins certainly can focus on other things.

I for one welcome the OSS revolution.

Re:Open source is NOT about profit!!!

[linvir]

Developers for the likes of Red Hat get paid for writing GPL software. Distro vendors make their money reselling GPL software. Open Source is commercial, not some ideological Star Trek project to free us from money. You don't help it by comparing it to religion.

Re:Enterprise

[zlogic]

This is modded funny, but consider these two examples:
1) string a = SELECT + a + FROM + b + WHERE + "param=" + c
2) string a = "SELECT " + a + " FROM " + b + " WHERE param=" + c
But putting it into a class that is completely isolated and doesn't have any methods (and otherwise SELECT will look like SqlWords.SELECT) is indeed insane.

It's a Mad Lib !!!!

[ericspinder]

I work for (noun) , and we use the open source app (noun) 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 (verb) the (noun) , and get (verb) on (noun) . It's a profitable business, as you can tell.

I work for The President , and we use the open source app SNORT 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 spy the people who who for us , and get blackmail on reporters . It's a profitable business, as you can tell.