Community Ingredients: Community Relations

It makes sense for an organization that uses open source to establish a channel of communication with the developers of the projects it uses. This might include financial support, moral support, and code contributions. The organization should observe and work with the community and avoid being a lightening rod. It pays to acknowledge community members. In fact, if an organization distributes modified open source, it should give attribution somewhere on the web site to those open source projects. Not only do most open source licenses require attribution anyway, this approach also fosters goodwill with the open source developers --- the people who provide you the royalty-free license and enforce its terms if necessary.

Recognize as well that your developers may be contributing to open source projects. In fact, the most productive open source developers contribute to numerous projects. This is to your organization's advantage. A large, active user community creates a more stable and better quality open source project. Improvements contributed by your organization will be supported in the future by the project, saving the organization the maintenance expense. The organization receives future compatibility, while the community receives a useful enhancement to the project.