Practical Ways to Improve Your Open Source Development Impact

Open source programs are sparking innovation at organizations of all types, and if your program is up and running, you may have arrived at the point where maximizing the impact of your development is essential to continued success. Many open source program managers are now required to demonstrate the ROI of their technology development, and example open source report cards from Facebook and Google track development milestones.

This is where the new, free Improving Your Open Source Development Impact guide can help. The aim of the guide is to help you increase your development team’s efficacy through and with open source contributions. By implementing some of the best practices laid out in the guide, you can:

• Reduce the amount of work needed from product teams
• Minimize the cost to maintain source code and internal software branches
• Improve code quality
• Produce faster development cycles
• Produce more stable code to serve as the base for products
• Improve company reputation in key open source communities.

Open source development requires a different approach than many organizations are accustomed to. But the work becomes easier if you have a clear plan to follow. Fortunately, a whole lot of companies and individuals have already forged a path to success in contributing to significant open source projects. They have tried and true methods for establishing a leadership role in open source communities.

This open source guide offers lessons for increasing open source development impact through specific examples. Contributing to the Linux kernel is one of the hardest challenges for open source developers. With that in mind, the guide uses this case as an example, but the lessons learned will apply to nearly any open source project you’ll work with.

“It took us years of constant discussion and negotiation to break from the traditional IT setup into a more flexible environment that supports our open source development,” said Ibrahim Haddad, Vice President of R&D and Head of the Open Source Group at Samsung Research. “We made it work for us and with enough persistence you also can make it work for your open source team.”

Common Challenges

Notably, organizations run into common problems as they try to improve the impact of their open source inventions. The Improving Your Open Source Development Impact guide can help you navigate common open source-related challenges. It covers everything from evaluating ROI to optimizing practices, and it explores how to seamlessly and safely leverage existing tools to complement your open source creations.

It is one of a new collection of free guides from The Linux Foundation and The TODO Group providing valuable insight and expertise for any organization running an open source program. The guides are available now to help you run an open source program office where open source is supported, shared, and leveraged.