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".

CPAN modules == $money

[Anonymous Coward]

I reckon my billing rate has gone up a couple of bucks for every CPAN module I've released over the years, especially for clients where I turn up and they are already using my code.

Not to mention that by releasing it, I get a whole bunch of people to hammer my code and find bugs, so I don't have to. It's a win-win situation!

Of course, since it's all on public display, uploading crappy badly-rating bug-ridden slop would probably have the opposite effect :/

Re:Open source is NOT about profit!!!

[AuMatar]

I'm going to have to disagree here. FOSS isn't about avoiding profit. Free software merely thinks there are things more important than profit, that need to be ensured first. Namely, the freedom of the user, as defined in the free software definition. If you can do that and make a profit, go for it.