RFC: Corporate Contributions to FOSS talk?

[Tetsu Yatsu]

I see a need for a talk on the subject of corporate relationships to
free open source software.

Companies are attracted to foss because it's free functionality, and
they're even willing to contribute to the community because they see
it as subversive advertising. However, this ends up with some
companies trying to create one-off open source projects with the
company name embedded everywhere. No one wants to use a project with
another company's name in it so the project dies, when it could
otherwise have been merged back into the parent project's codebase. A
lot of companies I've worked with have actually been downright afraid
to contribute to popular open source projects they use daily, because
they see no return on their investment.

There's a lot corporations can do to support open source projects, and
in fact there are even procedures for a company to take majority
stakehold in a project, getting tons of that 'advertising' they think
they way.

IMHO, corporations can offer computational resources to the Open
Source projects they use every day, starting up an EC2 instance to run
Jenkins or Buildbot to test your rubygems, egg packages, c++ projects,
etc, in multiple environments. They should fork every project they use
internally, and use post-build actions in one of these CI softwares to
merge changes from the original fork into their's, then eventually try
to shift dependence onto their fork. Eventually, people will submit
pull requests to them.



I'm looking for anyone's opinions on the subject (which I can't think
of a less verbose name for than "Attribution for Corporate
Contributions to FOSS") and/or a co-speaker.

Any takers? :)