Retaining and recognizing talent coming from open source communities

We talked about recognition of a company’s employees for their contributions to open source at the end of Chapter 4, Aligning the Business Value of Open Source for Your Employer, and when your talent comes from leaders in the open source community, it is critical to ensure those contributions are highlighted and celebrated. When it’s not, not only does the company walk away with a poor reputation, but the project suffers as well.

Further, bringing in talent from open source communities often is a catalyst to improve a company’s internal development processes. Open source community leaders and maintainers are of a culture that sees openness and collaboration as the way to build better software, faster and more efficiently. We’ve seen a trend known as innersourcing emerge in organizations, where the processes of open source development are applied to a company’s internal, proprietary...