"Open source is not just a way of getting free code"
This comment I found while reading a great article by Jordan Hubbard, BSD and OSX guru.
Jordan makes a great case for contributing back code into an OS project from a commercial effort trying to use the OS product. Below are some gems that I want to highlight.
I'm seeing more and more companies keeping internal source repositories of OS projects that they use to maintain their own modifications and fixes. Contribute back! Why take on the burden yourselves when the community already exists for free?!
And this final quote is fantastic, but sadly not followed. In fact one of the only companies that is doing anything close to this is JBoss. A company that is ironically being attacked by the same community that should be supporting such efforts.
"Finally, the open source software community can be an invaluable resource when it comes to recruiting skilled, motivated engineers who come with a ready-built understanding of at least some aspect of your product. This is one reason why developing and sustaining relations with the open source software community at the outset is so critical, and it should also be understood that open source software engineers recruited from this community will have a residual loyalty to this community. One nice way of maintaining your relationship with the community is to allow these engineers to continue doing some amount of (now-subsidized) work on the open source software public code base. They get better code, you get better code, and both sides win.