Open source is an under discussed piece of the social media revolution because you need special skills to be involved. Nevertheless, it represents a real value add in the online world for a non-trivial subset of companies. This begs the question, if your development team has been making modifications or upgrades to any open-source blogging platform and/or its plugins, is it worth sharing those upgrades with the open-source community?
Some would say that sharing work that you’ve paid good money for so that others can use it for free is an unsound business practice. Others would argue that you’ve reaped immense benefit from the open-source community and that you should give back.
I would agree with the latter statement, primarily because you have a lot more to gain in terms of goodwill than you do to to lose in terms of proprietary information. Unless the plugin that your engineers wrote is something that would be of direct and exclusive benefit to your competition, you should post it for other geeks to tinker with. Others might be able to innovate and expand in ways that could give you additional benefit down the line.
If you’re a company that provides a product or service to a geeky audience, your benefits grow further. The goodwill you will generate by participating in the open source community will probably get you a few new customers. And don’t underestimate the power of contributing to open source communities when it comes to recruiting. There are lots of smart geeks out there who want to make career moves, and if they see that your engineers know what they’re doing, they’ll be more likely to want to join your team.
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