AWS
Enterprises, in other words, have a limited amount of time; they prefer vendors who remove the burden of managing their own open source software deployments, regardless of whether those same vendors are active contributors to the projects in question. This particular survey didn’t involve AWS customers and, indeed, I’m sure the results would be the same if you asked developers that use Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, or any other cloud service. As much as you or I may think contributions to open source matter, customers just want to get stuff done as quickly as possible, for the lowest cost.
And yet there’s still an argument to be made for contributing to open source projects.
Contributions are part of the product
Back to my Postgres friend. Although he said customers may not care that so-and-so maintainer works for his company, having key contributors does enable his company to deliver excellent support to customers. In a community-run project such as Postgres or Linux, that doesn’t mean a particular employer gets to dictate road map, accelerate bug fixes, etc., but it does mean that they influence the road map. More importantly, it means they understand the code and the community around it and are thus better positioned to know how to weave short-term customer fixes into the main project without taking on technical debt. It also means, more simply, that they understand how to support a customer’s use of the code because they know that code intimately, in ways an interloping outsider simply doesn’t.
