The Business Case for Contributing Code

Speaker(s):

In the Drupal community we tend to talk about committing code to our public spaces (drupal.org, but also github) in terms of "contributing" and "contributions", and while much of it can be seen in that light, there are actually very strong business reasons for publishing your code and/or attempting to get your code changes committed to the open source project that you are working on.

We will be looking at several documents from the U.S. Military detailing their recommendations for contracting Open Source Software services, and will use those as a jumping off point to discuss the many benefits of contributing code. Some of the business reasons for public publishing we'll explore will include:
* The power of peer review. With enough eyes, all bugs are shallow, and with only a few eyes the stupidity knows no depths!
* Fork you! The costs associated with "hacking" both Drupal core and contrib modules and base themes.
* Take my code, please! Cost savings from committing patches.
* Professionals publish or perish. Using code commits as marketing towards clients or potential hires.
* It's so easy, even a child(ish person) could do it! How you can easily integrate patching into your development workflow.

This session will also include a walk through of how Zivtech handles code review, patches, and deployment processes and you will hopefully walk away convinced that all of your in-house and out-sourced developers should be publicly committing their work.

Slides: