Open source technologies are now an increasingly common sight in enterprise software stacks, with organisations using them to stand up their customer-facing and line-of-business applications, and power their infrastructure. Despite the best efforts of commercial software suppliers to position open source software as insecure, unreliable and ill-suited for enterprise use, large companies are using it avoid lock-in, drive down costs and speed up their software developments cycles.
In the light of these benefits, it is hoped enterprises will not only see fit to consume open source software, but contribute code of their own back to the communities that created it for myriad reasons.
First of all, the creativity and health of all open source communities rests heavily on having an engaged user base, that regularly contributes code and user feedback to the community to inform the next iteration of the product.
Without steady and reliable input from contributors, the output of the community as a whole – both from a product quality and quantity perspective – may be compromised.
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