I provided the following quotes to the Open Logistics Foundation’s member magazine, where they were published in German and in somewhat modified form. Here are the original quotes.
Managing your dependencies
“Using an open source component creates a dependency on that component. If this dependency is important, the most effective way to manage the dependency is to become a contributor to this component.”
Unloading the maintenance burden
“Open source lets you fix a bug with a component yourself; you don’t have to wait until a vendor fixes its closed source software. However, your developers will hate you if you don’t play back the bugfix, because now they will have to apply it over and over again with each new version of the component until the community fixes it. What a waste of energy that would be.”
Securing your technical road-map
“If you use an open source component, and you are not contributing, you don’t have a say in where the component is headed. If the component turns left, but you want it to go straight, you are out of luck. If you are contributing, however, you’ll see changes coming much earlier. Your contributions give you weight, and you may be able to react better or even counteract developments that don’t fit your roadmap.”
Being an attractive employer
“There is nothing more attractive to top developers than an employer who understands open source and lets them contribute to open source projects.”
Cluster-level competitive advantage
“Being part of an open source project community does not give you an advantage over your competitors who are also in this community. However, you are gaining a competitive advantage over all those who have not joined the community. Your developers are better and learning faster, your applications are better and less buggy, and your overall development speed is higher thanks to you being part of the development community. I call this the country-level or cluster-level competitive advantage that foundations like the OLF afford its members.”
(And if you liked the last quote, here is the reasoning behind it.)
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