A company's decision to contribute to open source projects is usually
business-driven. This article offers a review of the top reasons that can
influence your company to contribute source code to open source or to start
new open source projects.
1. Provide a reference implementation to a standard:
Open source is a potential venue to launch reference implementations of a
specification or standard, with the added benefit that such implementations
can gain faster acceptance than if they were kept proprietary. Examples of
companies that launched open source projects to provide a reference
implementation to a standard include:
Motorola, which open sourced its high-availability middleware stack, called
OpenSAF, to provide a reference implementation to the Service Availability
Forum specifications. For more information on OpenSAF visit www.opensaf.org/.
And Ericsson, whic... (more)
Open source software is shifting the software industry into a new paradigm,
moving from developing proprietary code behind closed doors to developing
code that can be shared, modified and redistributed openly. Key benefits
associated with this shift is reducing development cost and software
components complexity, developing re-usable common-off-the-shelf software
assets, while increasing flexibility and using common enablers. Organizations
that embrace the open source model and follow it when it influences
positively their ways of building software, will increase their chances to... (more)