1 THE HIDDEN BENEFIT OF GIVING BACK TO OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE
4 [Briefs] Sep 6, 2018 16:56 UTC (Thu) (corbet)
6 o Reference: 0000764321
7 o News link: https://lwn.net/Articles/764321/
11 The Harvard Business School's "Working Knowledge" site has
12 [1]an article arguing that it can pay for companies to allow
13 their developers to contribute back to the projects whose
14 software they use. " And that presents an interesting dilemma
15 for firms that rely heavily on open source. Should they allow
16 employees on company time to make updates and edits to the
17 software for community use that could be used by competitors?
18 New research by Assistant Professor Frank Nagle, a member of
19 the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School, shows that
20 paying employees to contribute to such software boosts the
21 company’s productivity from using the software by as much as
22 100 percent, when compared with free-riding competitors. "
26 [1] https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-hidden-benefit-of-giving-ba-
27 ck-to-open-source-software
30 ** The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software
33 This is no surprise to me. Most of the open source software
34 improvements that might help a competitor are too general in
35 nature to really be giving the other guys a competitive
38 For instance, if Lyft contributed Linux kernel or PHP or Apache
39 or whatever fixes, the benefit to Lyft of having that improved
40 expertise far exceeds the general benefit to competitor Uber.
43 ** The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software
46 This is no surprise to me. Most of the open source software
47 improvements that might help a competitor are too general in
48 nature to really be giving the other guys a competitive
51 For instance, if Lyft contributed Linux kernel or PHP or
52 Apache or whatever fixes, the benefit to Lyft of having that
53 improved expertise far exceeds the general benefit to
58 ** The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software
61 Even having to debate it seems so farcical. If you're worried
62 about people who "do the same thing", the software they use
63 is not the main differentiator. How your company is
64 organized, how you treat your people and your customers, how
65 you organized projects etc are huge, and software is
66 ultimately minor. Fixes and changes to software? Incredibly
71 ** The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software
74 Perhaps this is too dismissive, as there is the part about
75 letting your programmers do their job to the best of their
76 ability. That seems pretty big.
79 ** The Hidden Benefit of Giving Back to Open Source Software
82 Perhaps this is too dismissive, as there is the part about
83 letting your programmers do their job to the best of their
84 ability. That seems pretty big.