

Why your company should hire open source developers - edw519
http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/opensource/?p=821

======
makecheck
I think the article is technically referring to traits commonly found in
_project leads_ in open-source. As opposed to, people who make only
occasional, minor contributions to well-established projects, or just toss up
random code snippets on a blog, never to be updated again.

I am not at all criticizing the value of these other forms of contributions to
open-source. But I am skeptical that an interviewer could draw useful
conclusions when reviewing someone's open-source contributions if they are
minor. To examine the points of the article:

1\. "Knowing how well they write code": If they _aren't_ a chief maintainer of
a project, it's not really that easy to tell which random contributions are
theirs. You need some fairly large and organized example, for this to be a
practical review.

2\. "Knowing how to patch": I don't think the vast majority of projects have
to deal with this situation. So while it is useful experience, it doesn't seem
_more_ likely that someone in the open-source world would have that
experience.

3\. "Passion": Again, most people aren't going to be deeply passionate about
contributing 1 or 2 pages of code to a 10-year-old project that has thousands
of revisions. The people who _will_ be passionate are the ones who wrote the
thing from scratch and are improving it to this day.

4\. "Support": This is actually a paradoxical case, where the people merely
_using_ open-source software (and having never seen the code) may be more
qualified to support software over time, than the developers. This is because
developers spend their time, well, developing, and would be overwhelmed if
significant time was just support. Plus, see #3, how many people would be
passionate about a project that is a support burden?

5\. "Saving money": This is more a reason to use open-source software, than a
reason to hire any particular person because of their open-source experience.

~~~
wheels
There are really a couple or three genres of open source projects:

\- Those which are basically just hobby projects that are coincidentally open
source

\- Those which are basically commercial projects, but coincidentally open
source

\- Those which are large, community oriented projects, with real open source
dynamics

The first two really don't involve much additional benefit that wouldn't be
picked up elsewhere, despite legally being open source work. The last of them
is where you pick up the more requisite hackeryness.

------
rwolf
"Open source developers have had to think on their toes and patch the programs
that Microsoft has (often times) intentionally broken."

This is definitely true for members of the Samba team, but open source
development does not necessarily involve cleaning up Microsoft's mess. It also
does not necessarily involve a work ethic of any kind, good or bad.

I'd suggest hiring hardworking and quick-thinking developers; I don't think
work in open source precludes laziness or dullness.

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param
If an open source developer is defined as "one who is committed to a
particular OSS project and is a regular code/review contributor" there are
only two scenarios that I see where my company should hire him

1\. My company stands to benefit from the evolution of said project (think red
hat)

2\. He is ready to move on and not contribute to the project any more. I would
need his full attention to be on the project I am hiring him for.

I don't agree with the article that any random company should go and start
hiring open source developers.

~~~
thirdusername
(I'd like to apologize in advance if my tone is a bit harsh, I'm not trying to
be insulting.)

You'll get my full attention when you pay me for 16 hours of work, what I do
in my spare time isn't for you to decide. There also aren't a whole lot of
programmers to pick if you disqualify all the ones that work on side projects
(open or closed), just because you can see that hes working on something else
on his own time doesn't mean hes not doing his job.

------
jussij
I would have though the reason is quite simple. Most companies would fall into
the category of software users and as such have no desires what so ever to
become developers of software.

If you’re not in the business of developing software, you won’t be needing
software developers.

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Keyframe
I was thinking about hiring a dev or several to work on OSS I use too - it can
be a savings too, since if OSS you use and depend on and have vested interest
in has active development it can attract more developers you are not paying
for.

------
GeneralMaximus
I'm curious about the 6% (as of this writing) who voted "No" on the poll.

------
quellhorst
Have tried to hire open source developers. Most of them are very busy and
expensive. But I still ask prospective hires to see their GitHub accounts. If
they don't provide a link, they are automatically disqualified.

~~~
spitfire
And what if we don't have a github account? It's like disqualifying a
candidate because they like the wrong sports team, or make a vodka rather than
gin martini. Pure idiocy.

Not to mention just because they haven't written open source in the past
doesn't preclude quality work. I'd hire someone who does DO-178B over an
average open source developer any day.

~~~
quellhorst
The point wasn't the GitHub account, although most developers I know in the
Ruby on Rails land have one and put all their open source code there. Since
Rails is so GitHub centric, you can see if they forked any rails apps, what
they are watching, etc.

If they had stuff on their own repositories or other sites like RubyForge,
Google Code, etc. that is fine.

When someone does open source code it shows that they are passionate about
programming and that they are not doing it just for a paycheck.

