How Has Open Source Helped You Commercially?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on Wednesday May 3, 2006 @03:55PM from the questions-for-programmers dept.

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?"

2 of 96 comments (clear)

Min score:

Reason:

Sort:

Snippet? by Solemn+Bob · 2006-05-03 16:18 · Score: 3, Insightful

If you know the problem is in a snippet of code, you've already solved the problem.
You may be joking, but Microsoft benefitted by ron_ivi · 2006-05-03 18:26 · Score: 3, Insightful

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).