Contributing to open source is not as easy as it looks
September 11, 2008 —
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Giving code back to an open-source community can be like giving a gift when you don’t know the cultural rules: There’s always a chance your basket of code won’t be accepted. At the same time, fresh open-source projects can wither on the vine if not properly tended. Therefore, it is prudent for enterprise developers to set a clear path, both in and out, for code of all kinds.
Peter Vescuso, senior vice president of marketing and business development at Black Duck, said, “First, you have to get a handle on your own internal requirements uses. What kind of policies are you going to have internally around use and giving back?”
Once a policy is in place, there are various levels of contribution to consider. Ian Skerrett, director of marketing with the Eclipse Foundation, said, “We always think about multiple levels of contributions and ways of contributing,” at Eclipse. “At a basic level there are things like opening bugs or adding new feature requests. That's, at a basic level, still very valuable to the community. Of course, an even better bug is a bug with a patch to it.”
Eclipse has a large number of corporate code donors, but Skerrett said that many of the e-mail addresses seen in the project's Bugzilla database are from places like Hotmail and Gmail rather than more corporate addresses.
“There's still a perception that you participate, but you don't expose your company's identity, which is a bit frustrating because it would be nice to better understand who's contributing. My understanding is that their perception is they don't want to have any potential negative perception come back to the company if things don't go well,” said Skerrett.
And things can easily not go well, said Bernard Golden, CEO of Navica and author of “Succeeding With Open Source.”
Golden said that the projects must be comfortable with potential contributors. “The key thing is to make sure you have a good relationship with the maintainers of the project so they know you and are willing to accept your code. It's not like you can just throw code in and say, 'I want this in the mainline, so snap to it.' ”
Related Search Term(s): open source, Eclipse
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