Contribute or Be Shamed

What is the appropriate amount of contribution to an open source project?

I came across an article titled "Does Ubuntu Contribute its Share to Free Software Projects? and thought I would share the issue with my readers to see what your thoughts on contribution expectations are when considering open source projects. The article is a follow-up to an issue that has arisen between the GNOME desktop project, Canonical (Ubuntu), and Red Hat about the level of contribution that GNOME is seeing from the Ubuntu community.

At issue is the amount of software that is contributed to GNOME from the Ubuntu community and if Ubuntu should provide more software as does Red Hat. You can easily read the complete set of issues and comments in the article, but I want to focus on the issue of giving back. Does any entity (person or company) that takes and uses open source software have an obligation to give back any changes they make to the software or is simply using and/or distributing the software to more users enough? Please ignore the legal aspects of this alone as there is not part of the licenses requiring giving code back.

I am interested to see what the readers of this blog think as I used to think that giving back was a requirement for good open source behavior but am now convinced that anyone who takes an open source solution and uses it or promotes it to more users is more important. A successful open source project needs a growing user base to justify its existence; otherwise it is just a group of developers working together. The larger the user community, the more chances that new developers will join in thus creating new features, etc.

Also, I have more info on the Microsoft Open Source project I wrote about recently and will be providing an update on that Thursday or Friday.

• open source