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Asked: 2026-05-11T00:01:06+00:00

I was always wondering about this seemingly utopic world of open source. Assuming the

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I was always wondering about this seemingly utopic world of open source.

Assuming the vast majority of users here are professional software engineers which need some sort of income source, I assume most of us hold stable, money-making jobs.

So who are the key players in the open source community? Who are the people which devote their precious time to these projects? What is their benefit? Are the majority just people who see a bug, fix it, submit, and forget about the project? Or are they people constantly involved in the process of building the product?

How do you find yourself contributing to open source projects?

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  1. I earn my living doing professional projects that are based on either open source frameworks or commercial products, and quite often a combination of both.

    A lot of the commercial products I have used over the years end up being really very expensive in the end. Let’s say you buy a Single-Sign-On solution for web apps. By the time you’re finished with what you have to do, I and a lot of others have experienced that you end up re-implementing 2/3ds of it, and sometimes there’s almost nothing left of the commercial product you thought you were going to use.

    So the problem with buying stuff is that it never fits, and quite often the purchase decision is based upon function-matrices that compare features whilst not actually considering the suitability of those features in your own environment.

    What I’m trying to get at is that mature organizations understand that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, even after you paid for the product license. The fact that you spent $1M for a content management system does not mean you’re not going to spend another $2M doing 50% planned and 50% unplanned activities related to that.

    So we can, will and do write patches for all OSS projects we’re involved with. Sometimes we rework subsystems, and most of the time we submit it back. Sometimes we decide we only want 50% of the framework and we just fork of the rest for ourself. But we still want to stay with the framework for that 50% which we use. Try doing that with a commercial product 😉 In general we try to stay on the ‘developers ‘ mailing list, but we seldom bother to get commit rights for the projects.

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