Companies: make sustainable contributions
Quoting: Companies: make sustainable contributions - Duck Alignment Academy —
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.