Companies: make sustainable contributions

You know what’s great? When companies contribute to open source projects. But not all contributions are created equal. If there’s anything that we’ve learned over the past year or two, it’s that corporate participation in an open source project is not guaranteed. The contributions a company makes need to be sustainable long after the company stops participating.

I had a conversation with someone a while back who suggested their company could contribute a website redesign to a project. The company’s web designer could do the work and the company could host it on their web service. That’s well-intended, but what happens when the rest of the community needs to make a change? What happens when the company shifts away from that project?

If you’re representing a company, you should be cautious any contribution that makes the community more dependent on your company. Whether it’s a one-time contribution that can’t easily be updated later or it’s a major service that becomes a load-bearing part of the project, you don’t want to end up stuck.

If you’re leading a project, you don’t want to put the project a position to fall on its face when the company contribution disappears. If a contribution seems to make your project overly-dependent, you don’t have to accept it. You can negotiate a mutually-agreeable contribution.

Of course, the world isn’t simple. One side effect of this advice is that company contributions are minimized so that open source projects don’t become too dependent. This is not the goal. Companies should invest in open source projects and heavily. They depend on the work done every day by countless open source communities. So how do we make big investments without creating dependence?

The best way is to get several other companies to pitch in, too. That way if one disappears, the others can keep things going. Think of this as a different angle on the Flywheel Theory of Community Engagement. Foundations and fiscal sponsors can be a good avenue for building this collective effort.

Contributing in ways that the community can sustain is another good approach. A company can contribute some of a tech writer’s time to fill in gaps in the community’s documentation and then the community can maintain that in the future.

If you’re making a contribution for your company, commit to an exit strategy up front. Maybe you won’t ever need it, but you want to have a committed plan for how you’ll slowly pull away from an ongoing contribution. This gives the project, should they need to, a chance to find alternatives instead of abruptly losing a key part of the infrastructure or community.

This post’s featured photo by Josh Appel on Unsplash.