Aligning the Business Value of Open Source for Your Employer

If you’ve read Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, you’ve hopefully come away with some concrete motivations for using open source and starting an open source project. And if you’ve made it to this chapter, you are probably thinking, “there is some great code at my company we should open source!” That’s the right attitude!

However, there’s a lot more than meets the eye when it comes to an employer seeing the value of contributing to an open source project, let alone starting one. As an individual deciding to contribute to open source or start an open source project, the justification is usually quite simple: you have something interesting to you that you want others to benefit from, or are using a project and you see something that you want to fix or improve – what is often referred to as the scratch-your-own-itch pattern. You may also find the work that a project is doing helpful...