Don Marti

Mon 20 May 2013 08:19:26 PM PDT

What are the benefits of participating in open source?

Depending on the project and your role in it, you might get lots of different benefits.

• Learn new languages and tools to keep your skill set current.

• Practice techniques that you might not be able to justify putting time into in a corporate environment. (For example, coding for extreme security or efficiency or minimum power and memory usage.)

• Make connections with people outside your company.

• Signal your technical competence and ability to work with others. Often, willingness to put time into open source depends on the job market for high-skill non-management programmers. The more that the hiring process depends on formal education and certification, and the less input it has from peers, the less incentive that a programmer has to Signal his or her skill using open source.

• Talk with real users about bugs and features without a company filter, to get a better understanding of a software problem space.