In the first article in my series on open source program offices, I took a deep dive into what an open source program office is and why your company might need one. Next I looked at how Google created a new kind of open source program office. In this article, I’ll explain a few benefits of having an open source program office.
At first glance, one big reason why a company not in the business of software development might more enthusiastically embrace an open source program office is because they have less to lose. After all, they’re not gambling with software products that are directly tied to revenue. Facebook, for example, can easily unleash a distributed key-value datastore as an open source project because they don’t sell a product called “enterprise key-value datastore.” That answers the question of risk, but it still doesn’t answer the question of what they gain from contributing to the open source ecosystem.
Read more at OpenSource.com
