First, a bit of history. December of 2000 marked a major milestone in the history of open source when IBM pledged to spend $1 billion on Linux R&D. IBM was a true pioneer in the enterprise world putting its bet on Linux and open source when very few companies did — and definitely not at that scale. IBM had to learn a lot about working with open source software and the various project communities they were involved in.

That was the starting point for enterprise open source and companies have since followed IBM by the dozens and then hundreds. Yet, thousands of companies are still entering open source as it is becoming the new normal of software development. The question is: How can we minimize the enterprise learning curve and speed up the process of “getting it right?”

The answer is easy, but the application of that answer to specific company culture is the hard aspect. Let’s explore some of the “easy” aspects of learning from over 17+ years of enterprise experience with open source software. You’ll get to deal with the hard aspect of applying those lessons to your particular enterprise environment.

A word of caution: In addition to implementing these practices, you will need to lead a cultural shift from traditional software development practices to a more open and collaborative mindset. Internal company dynamics need to be favorable to open source efforts. As an open source leader inside your organization, you will face several challenges in terms of funding resources, justifying ROI, getting upstream focus, etc. These often require a major shift in mindset and a lot of education up the chain.

1) Hire key developers and maintainers from the project’s community

It takes considerable time to grow internal open source expertise. Hiring key developers is a critical step that allows your organization to quickly gain skills and recognition.

Two or three people are a great start towards making a noticeable impact in a large project such as the Linux kernel, attracting further hires, and allowing enough resources to mentor existing junior developers. (See our guide on Recruiting Open Source Developers)

The goal is to find people who have enough peer recognition to be influential in the community. There are typically three pillars to this: domain expertise, open source methodology, and working practices.

You also need to align corporate interests with individual interests: it’s very hard to motivate a senior open source developer to work when their personal interests don’t meet with corporate interests in a given project. For example, a Linux memory management expert may not be interested in working on file systems, a corporate priority. Therefore, finding a match in interests is critical for a long-lasting relationship.

2) Allocate Time for Upstream Contributions

The core principle for hiring open source developers is to support your open source development and upstream activities. There is also the expectation that they should support product teams in their expertise areas. However, it’s not uncommon for product teams to exercise their influence in an attempt to hijack the time of the open source developers by having them work on product development as much as possible. If this happens, many open source developers will head to the door, seeking a new job that allows them to work on their upstream project before you realize what just happened.

Therefore, it’s important to create and maintain a separation of upstream work and product work. In other words, it’s recommended to provide your open source developers with guaranteed time to meet their upstream aspirations and responsibilities, especially if they are a maintainer. For junior developers or other internal developers who are using open source in product components, such interactions with the upstream community will increase their language, communication, and technical skills. In the absence of such an upstream time guarantee, it’s easy for these team members to be sucked into becoming an extension of product teams, resulting in their upstream focus drying up in favor of product development.

You should also be the upstream partner for product teams; they often feel like they’re living inside a pressure cooker, especially in a consumer electronics environment. They often seem understaffed, lack critical resources to support parallel upstream development, and are under constant pressure for feature delivery within tight schedules. In such an environment, it’s very easy to overlook the benefit of upstreaming in favor of short-term time savings that can unfortunately lead to technical debt that has a higher cost in the long term. Open source teams can help by being a partner that focuses on delivering important code upstream, reducing this technical debt.

Encourage developers outside the open source team to learn from and contribute to the open source community. We provide as much help as we can with upstream code contributions, but our resources are limited, and we don’t always have the deep understanding of products that might be needed to adequately identify where code can be upstreamed. Better involvement in the open source community from teams outside our own allows us to get more important code upstream, and improves our ability to interact with the community.

3) Create a Mentorship Program

Grow open source talent in specific technology areas relevant to your products. It’s easy to hire a few resources from outside the company, but there are several limitations to this approach.

The alternative approach is to convert your existing developers into open source contributors via training on the technical domain and open source methodology. These developers can then be paired with a mentor to further expand their skills.

Set up a mentorship program where senior, experienced open source developers provide mentorship to junior, less experienced developers. Typically, the mentorship program would run for 3 to 6 months; during this time, the mentor should supervise the work of the mentee, assign tasks, and ensure proper results. The mentor would also do code reviews for anything the mentee produces, and provide feedback before the mentee pushes the code to the upstream project.

The goal is to increase the number of developers the company has contributing code to the upstream project, and to improve individual effectiveness by increasing the quality of code and the percentage of code that is accepted into the upstream project. Generally speaking, no more than 4-5 mentees should be assigned to a given mentor, and ideally they should work in the same area as the mentor to make code reviews more efficient.

4) Formalize an Open Source Career Path

Create an open source developer track in your human resources (HR) system so people hired as open source developers have a good sense of how their career will progress within the company versus other non-open source developers. Additionally, you should adjust performance-based bonuses to include goals related to open source development work. The metrics by which the performance of proprietary or closed source developers are measured are often different than those of open source developers.

At some companies, there is a clear distinction between open source and non-open source developers. But in many companies, the line is much more fluid, depending on its organizational structure and open source strategy. In reality, all modern developers have to work with open source. There are no closed source developers. Rather, there are times their code stays inside the company and times their code is published (contributed to a third party, or published as a new project). Your HR track and incentives should reflect your organization’s unique structure and approach to open source.

Finally, allow a work from home policy for open source developers, regardless of the general corporate policy related to this. Lately, we have witnessed a reverse in work from home policies across companies where many have either banned or created strict limitations to working from home. In the open source world, a work from home policy is almost mandatory because open source experts are located all over the planet, and this policy is often the only way to hire them.

There are operational benefits to a flexible work policy as well. Offering remote work options reduced employee turnover, and “job attrition rates fell by over 50 percent,” according to a study published by Stanford University. And a study by PGI, a leading provider of software services, found that 80 percent of workers reported higher morale when working from home, while 69 percent reported lower absenteeism.

5) Offer Training

It’s impossible for any company to hire all the senior and most expert developers in a given domain. This concept applies to the Linux Kernel and any other prominent open source project. Therefore, you must have a way for your company to increase the competence of its developers in a given technical domain. In addition to technical training, you’ll also need training to teach the open source development model and the basic concepts of open source legal compliance.

Sample training courses include:

Technical training that covers the various areas in the Linux Kernel. Maintainers or senior developers usually present this to grow internal Kernel expertise; this expertise is vital to pass on given how challenging it is to hire expert Kernel developers.

Open source development methodology course that teaches staff that’s new to open source how open source and Linux Kernel development works and how to best get engaged.

Open source compliance course that teaches staff the basics of compliance principles and open source licensing. This should also be used to inform them of your company’s policy and process. [The Linux Foundation offers a free online open source compliance training for developers. The course is available here.]

6) Participate in Open Source Events

Support your developers to attend and participate in open source conferences and events, including local community meetups, hackathons, and summits. Such participation helps them connect at a personal level with their peers, build relationships, have face to face social interactions, and participate in technical discussions that guide the project direction.

If your developers have work that others might be interested in, help these developers prepare content to present. Finally, you can also sponsor events, both big and small, to increase external visibility within the project’s community. These events are also a great venue to look for talent!

7) Provide a Flexible IT Infrastructure

Provide a flexible IT infrastructure that allows open source developers to communicate and work with the open source and Linux Kernel community without any challenges. Additionally, set up internal IT infrastructure that matches the tools used externally to help bridge the gap between internal teams and the Kernel community or any other open source project community for that purpose.

Much of your infrastructure will naturally evolve along with your organization’s open source culture, but it’s important to be aware of the necessity and plan for its implementation.

There are three primary domains of IT services that are used in open source development: knowledge sharing (wikis, collaborative editing platforms, and public websites), communication and problem solving (mailing lists, forums, and real-time chat), and code development and distribution (code repositories and bug tracking). Some or all of these tools will need to be made available internally to properly support open source development. There is a chance this might conflict with existing company-wide IT policies. If so, it’s vital to resolve these conflicts and allow open source developers to use the tools they are familiar with.

These open source practices typically require an IT infrastructure that is free from many standard, limiting IT policies.