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Source: The following is from the Guide "Participating in Open Source Communities"

Open source has become the de facto way to build software – not only in tech, but across diverse industries. As companies use open source code to build their own commercial products and services, they also see the strategic value of contributing back to those projects.

However, diving in without an understanding of those projects, their communities, and how they operate can lead to frustrations for those companies as well as the open source communities. Approaching open source contributions without a strategy can tarnish a company’s reputation in the open source community and incur legal risks.

This guide covers what it means to contribute to open source as an organization and how to become a good corporate citizen. Learn how open source projects are structured, how to contribute, why it’s important to devote internal developer resources to participation, and why it’s important to create a strategy for open source participation and management.

Contents

• Why contribute to open source?
• How open source projects are managed
• How contributions work
• What it means for an organization to contribute
• How to be a good corporate citizen when participating in an open source project
• Best practices to contribute code upstream
• How to create your open source contribution strategy
• 11 tips for mastering open source contributions
• Final words

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NOTE: These resources were created in partnership with the TODO (Talk Openly, Develop Openly) Group – the professional open source program networking group at The Linux Foundation. A special thanks goes out to the open source program managers who contributed their time and knowledge to making these comprehensive guides. Participating companies include Autodesk, Comcast, Dropbox, Facebook, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Netflix, Oath (Yahoo + AOL), Red Hat, Salesforce, Samsung and VMware. To learn more, visit: https://todogroup.org/ todogroup.org// ~~DISCUSSION:on|Outstanding Issues~~ ~~DISCUSSION:off~~