Business Success with Open Source

Be Clear About Your Goals

A lot of questions can come up when discussing outbound FOSS in the context of your business, and most of their answers can be strategic if you put your mind to it. Determining how and where your company will engage can create new business strategies or support the ones already in place. Importantly, answering these questions gives you the opportunity to document why your company is engaging in outbound FOSS at all.

By making the expected or desired outcomes—that is, the goals of outbound engagement—explicit, your company is well on the path to success with its FOSS strategies. I’ve seen surprisingly few companies that have expressed or documented their outbound FOSS goals; most rely instead on vague statements that ...