Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Is It Good For Business To Subsidize OSS Developers?

Posted by Soulskill on from the riding-the-foss-money-train dept.

ruphus13 writes "A lot of developers for open source software have full-time day jobs too. As economist Milton Friedman said, 'The business of business is business.' So, does it make sense for companies to encourage their developers to contribute to the open source community? OStatic discusses a blog post by Alfresco exec Matt Asay, who makes the case for why they should. '"Companies like IBM, Intel, SGI, MIPS, Freescale, HP, etc. are all working to ensure that Linux runs well on their hardware. That, in turn, makes their offerings more attractive to Linux users, resulting in increased sales." While I don't think we'll ever see companies everywhere subsidizing employee development of open source tools, many tech and non-tech companies alike could benefit from subsidizing open source development from employees with talent. If more companies woke up to this idea, we'd see more purpose-driven, mission-critical open source software shared by firms in the same industries. That, ultimately, would benefit the companies providing the subsidies.' Should your employer pay you for time spent on open source development?" snydeq points out an Infoworld story suggesting that there's something to learn from the way French companies are promoting open-source development.

1 of 124 comments (clear)

  1. Yes: case study from Google / ZXing by srowen · · Score: 4, Informative

    I am from Google and co-operate the "zxing" open-source barcode reader project. (http://code.google.com/p/zxing) Two of us were allowed to devote most of our time for 6 months to this open project, because it made strategic sense for the business.

    Why? To be brief, 2D barcodes open up new possibilities for advertising services in print. Our Print Ads business wanted to build services around them. However the market is still developing and while there are some dominant open standards evolving, there are several proprietary formats emerging. We thought it best -- both for the ecosystem but also for our business -- if the open standards won. So we explicitly set out to promote them, and one way of doing that is to release free, open, quality software that uses the open standards.

    Contributing to open source can definitely be strategically valuable.