Re: Talk about commercializing open source software

On Wed, 09 Nov 2011 22:22:35 Peter Harrison wrote:
> However, many companies do exactly the same thing without really
> talking about the open source under the covers. It could be makers of
> home routers, expensive integration engines, firewall services, email
> spam protection. There may be a combination of open source and closed,
> but ultimately they are all (mostly) contributing to the projects they
> use.

Yup - every company I've worked for for the past 15 years has used open source 
software and contributed their changes and bug fixes back to the various 
projects we've used. 

At one time a company I worked for had 2 people on staff who's primary job was 
to work full time on outside projects (the linux kernel and glibc), 
occasionally we'd ask them to help us with something we really needed doing 
that they had an intimate knowledge of (like "how can we delete really big 
files without making disk performance come to a complete stop?"- we built 
settop boxes)

(then again there was that time we had certain file system developer on as a 
contractor ... the less said about that the better ...)

We didn't make a big deal about using open source stuff - but we didn't hide it 
either (all the copyrights were there in the UI if you looked for them and of 
course the code is still on the web site as per the GPL)

The same is true at my current gig - 95% of what we ship is open source 
(kernel libraries) , maybe 3% closed source drivers from our silicon vendors 
and the rest we wrote ourselves - we all get to stand on the shoulders of 
giants

	Paul

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