Not sure if I’m noticing this trend a wee bit late, but it seems like more and more software tool vendors are bending over backwards to give away their development tools to the open source community. Atlassian does this for JIRA, it’s issue tracking software, Jet Brains does for IntelliJ, Cenqua Clover for test coverage, and I can’t keep track of the number of companies that have volunteered to host nightly builds for us on the Apache Lucene project.

I suppose some of the reasons for this are:

1. Like most OS developers, I have a day job. Perhaps the hope is that I will say, “wow, that is great, I need this at my company!” and my company will go and purchase the product
2. For other companies, they may do this as a way of saying thank you. Many of these products utilize a large number of OS libraries, so a donated license is a great way of giving back, and heck, they probably get a tax break, too and some nice, free marketing.
3. All of the above

So, I’m curious. Are you an Open Source Developer that has recommended software to your company based on using it on your OS project? Can you think of any other reasons for the donations? I wonder what the true cost of these donations are to the company, especially the ones that volunteer to host resources. Also, how well do they respond to Open Source developers requests for bug fixes and enhancements? Is it really worth an OS project to take on a donated license?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 7th, 2007 at 9:39 pm and is filed under Computers, Java, Lucene, Open Source, Programming, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.