Matthew Langham often posts on the relationships between Open Source projects and commercial organisations profiting from those projects. Usually I find myself agreeing with his views, I did so again today when he said:
"I still think that just linking to an Open Source project from your home-page to "show your appreciation" isn't enough though. That link should be to a page showing just what you have done to give back to the community. Far more effective."
What a great concept. Thinking about the projects I work on most commercial organisations that use the software “show their appreciation“ by adding their names to a “used by” list. Think about it, this is actually benificial to the company in question as it is another inbound link, often from a fairly high ranked page.
Other companies show their appreciation in much more concrete ways, Matthew lists some of them as "code, time, test-results, documentation, hardware, writing articles about the project", there are of course many more ways (I could really do with some financial support whne I present at ApacheCon Europe this year, as could most of the presenters).
Why should companies who actively support a project and its community get the same “billing” as those who simply use it? I‘m going to discuss this on some of the projects I am involved with and see what we can come up with.
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Well? Should we do anything about this?
Ross
