Since Eric S. Raymond wrote Cathedral and the Bazaar in the 90s, it's been clear that (often) contributing code with an Open Source license results in lower development costs in the long run because you don't have the overhead of maintaining your own private fork. For example...
Lets say you pick up a piece of Open Source software, implement it and make some bug fixes and new features along the way. By contributing those bug fixes you avoid the overhead of having to merge your own bug fixes and features into the code base again and again as you pull in other bug fixes and features from other developers. By releasing your bug fixes and features into the open source code base you have a competitive advantage over your competitors who maintain a private fork of the same software.
Open Source is not charity. It's profit driven. For those that say "it's the right thing to do," either they're doing it for the competitive advantage mentioned above without realizing it or they might just be wasting their time releasing useless open source code. That's not to say I don't think releasing your code is often the right thing to do, I'm CTO for a nonprofit bringing Open Source to Open Educational Resources (http://ole.org) and collaborative development in farming (http://farmhack.net), I'm clearly no crazy capitalist but we use open source for the competitive advantage because as a nonprofit, why not do the best you can do? Open source rocks. Thank you to the giants who pioneered Open Source.
Lets say you pick up a piece of Open Source software, implement it and make some bug fixes and new features along the way. By contributing those bug fixes you avoid the overhead of having to merge your own bug fixes and features into the code base again and again as you pull in other bug fixes and features from other developers. By releasing your bug fixes and features into the open source code base you have a competitive advantage over your competitors who maintain a private fork of the same software.
Open Source is not charity. It's profit driven. For those that say "it's the right thing to do," either they're doing it for the competitive advantage mentioned above without realizing it or they might just be wasting their time releasing useless open source code. That's not to say I don't think releasing your code is often the right thing to do, I'm CTO for a nonprofit bringing Open Source to Open Educational Resources (http://ole.org) and collaborative development in farming (http://farmhack.net), I'm clearly no crazy capitalist but we use open source for the competitive advantage because as a nonprofit, why not do the best you can do? Open source rocks. Thank you to the giants who pioneered Open Source.