Why should employers encourage contribution to Open Source?

I have a strong belief that participation in Open Source projects can increase ones chances to find their first job. As an extension, continued contribution might improve the chances to find a new job for people already employed.

Given this I wonder what do you think, why is it valuable for an employer to encourage its employees to contribute to open source projects? What would the employer gain from that?

Comments

[Joe Mainwaring]

As a manager, I encourage my direct reports to participate in the open source ecosystem as we depend on a significant amount of OSS work to produce our for-profit products. I emphasize to my employees that participation does not exclusively mean code contribution - providing feedback (bug reports, feature requests) is sufficient in my book.

But from an organization perspective, I have stopped short of trying to get the culture to embrace open source participation. Why? A few reasons:

• Priorities. I need my team members primarily focused on moving the business forward.
• Positioning. Our products are in the employee experience category, not the developer tool category. If we were Ionic for example, then it would make more sense for us to be more active participants in the open source community.
• Finite Resources. As a non FANNG company, we have finite labor, time, and money, and have to balance our decision making accordingly. While I could advocate for an OSS event to foster participation, I'd rather use that political capital on other culture events like a hackathon to foster creativity and help drive our products forward.

[Emil Perhinschi]

"why is it valuable for an employer to encourage its employees to contribute to open source projects"

Open source is infrastructure employers don't have to spend time to manage. They could surely finance it, but they won't have to pay for management time, waste time in meetings etc. Imagine each company having to create their own suite of DateTime::* modules that CPAN provides.

Relying on non-open dependencies is very often a big pain in the checkbook since most of them are quite poorly documented thus need a lot of time spent on trial and error or decompiling, begging for info on forums etc. while attempting to figure out how they're supposed to work because there is no source available to actually see how they work, and there are no guarantees they will not disappear, while with open-source dependencies you can at least take over maintenance or fork them if the original author loses interest.

Encouraging the employees to contribute: that's the same as encouraging them to add to their CV and probably as motivating as a wage increase. Yes, some will get enough on their CV to be tempted to leave for greener pastures, but an even worse outcome would be to have employees whose contributions are not valuable enough to be accepted by open source projects :-).