I didn’t love Dries Buytaert’s article earlier this month (“How takers hurt makers in open source”), as I feel it sets up a misleading war between the “makers” and “takers” of open source. Every company (and individual) on earth—no exceptions—is both maker and taker when it comes to open source. There’s no company I know, however, that does a better job of balancing the two than Magento (now owned by Adobe).
Magento, after all, averages 50 percent of its code coming from developers not on the Magento payroll. In a world awash in single-vendor open source projects who do nearly all of their own development, this is almost unheard of. How do they do it?