The community will help you solve problems with the open source software project you are using. If they know who you are, have a relationship with you and know you are working to improve the project, they are much more likely to help you quickly when you (or your customers) have a problem.

If you work with them, they are also more likely to understand your needs (and those of your customers) and the product will be more likely to meet your needs in the future.

I have this conversation a lot at large companies I work with. More often than not the issue as I encounter it is when someone finds a bug in an FOSS package that they are already using, say for example JBoss, and they fix it. They are then faced with the dilemma of getting that fix back to the community but returning their focus to their actual job. The key in these situations is to not allow the community involvement to take over and also to focus on the value received initially.

Another issue is liability, perceived or real. Most times this ends up with the individual being allowed to contribute back but under their own name and not their employers.

And then there is the competitive advantage/non-disclosure type of issues. Many companies do not want their competitors to know what they are doing and/or using. Many companies are worried that you might accidentally disclose some other secret besides the source code fixes for the project. This simply needs to be thought out and worked through. Set up a process to review any changes you are going to release back into the wild. On the other hand, this will not prevent you from saying something on a mailing list or support forum that your employer might not like.

These are hard. Most people I know end up doing this on their own time.

If you're using open source in any solutions in your business, and if there are any circumstances under which you decide to add a feature or fix a bug in the code you are using, it is very much in your interests to participate and "contribute" the change to the community.

I say "contribute" in quotes becuase actually what you are doing is asking the rest of the individuals in the project to share the maintenance of the code you've written. If you decide to keep the improvement you made to yourself, you are doomed for the rest of eternity to have to either refactor your changes to fit updated releases, or to stop using them when new releases arrive, or to forgo use of the new version.

I'd thus suggest that, in this case where you're highly dependent on the code to the point of fixing it, it is dumb not to participate. Failing to participate will cost you money, make you less productive and limit the profit you can make for your shareholders.

Open source participation works best when you are doing it out of self-interest, as opposed to any philosophical reason.

There are many reasons for using and participating in FOSS projects:

• Self-reliance and reduced vendor lock-in.
• Ability to fix issues yourself if needed
• Ability to customize the software to exactly meet your needs
• Ability to prototype quickly and cost effectivley
• Lower procurement costs

The best argument is one that improves the economics, suitability, and quality of software usage for a part or all of the business.

It depends in part on what your business is, but probably the best place to start with a boss vis a vis open source is economics. This may seem counterintuitive, given that open source involves making at least some portion of software available for free, but the fact is that open source is now the foundation for some exceedingly large commercial ecosystems, with Apache, Eclipse and Linux being perhaps the three most notable examples. These communities harness open source's advantages in distribution and community build for the benefit of commercial organizations.

Then there's the "everyone else is doing it argument." Some of the largest and most profitable businesses in the world from Adobe to HP to IBM to Oracle have realized this and are now actively engaged in commercial work around open source. Open source has been so successful, in fact, that even previously opposed commercial entities such as Microsoft are now actively contributing to and interoperating with open source projects.

Additionally, participating in or joining open source communities can provide wider distribution, additional go to market opportunities, more efficient access to qualified resources, support and service advantages, a better understanding of the project roadmap and more.