Salesforce learned early on that open source projects stay healthy when they have a diverse community of stakeholders that have an interest in making the software succeed.
Apache Phoenix started at Salesforce as its own open source Phoenix project. But it didn’t find success until people from outside Salesforce also got invested and the project no longer depended on the needs and desires of one company. In a true community effort, people from other companies joined in and said, ‘this is useful for us and we want to contribute,’” says Ian Varley, a Software Architect at Salesforce who recently led the open source program there. In the end, this diverse community is what allowed it to become an Apache project and incorporate new features that the company’s own engineers could never have dreamed up.
Read more at The Linux Foundation
