Ron Bongo here once more to give you more insights on business and how you could learn more about open source concepts.

Learn more about open source software with Ron Bongo and how it can help enterprises cut business cost. The fundamental question however is whether enterprises benefiting from Open Source are giving back to the community responsible for these applications.

We have discussed in this blog how enterprises can benefit tremendously from using Open Source applications in terms of productivity, better management and of course significant reductions in costs. But are these enterprises giving back to the community responsible for bringing them these goodies? According to a recent Accenture survey, only 29% out of 300 respondent organizations are willing to share their code back to the community.

According to Accenture’s Chief Technology Architect Paul Daugherty, the main reason for this small percentage falls with the issue of intellectual property – it’s the thing giving these enterprises a competitive advantage. Enterprises will put an even tighter grip on their codes if they already integrated mission-critical processes to these applications. Daugherty however states that these enterprises will eventually contribute later on as these enterprises begin to mature in their open-source experience and when they come to realize that sharing will actually give them more advantages in the long run.

One large enterprise that has been part of the early contributors to the open-source community is financial giant JPMorgan Chase Bank particularly with their Advanced Message Queuing Protocol that they turned over to the community for further development. Since then, the protocol has been appearing in other products and applications such as Red Hat Incorporated’s messaging middleware Enterprise MRG.

One benefit that enterprises can gain from sharing codes is the lower software maintenance costs as the open-source community will take over in updating and enhancing the code. This will be a great strategic move for enterprises to take as they continue to mature and embrace the principles of Open Source.

Come back here to learn more about the open source concept and learn how its benefits can help your business or profession as brought to you by Ron Bongo.