Comcast’s involvement in open source was a gradual process that evolved over time. The company eventually created two open source program offices, one for the NBC business and another for the cable side of the business, which is the subject of this profile.
Comcast began contributing to open source around 2006 when Jon Moore, Chief Software Architect, made a patch contribution to Apache HTTP. He showed the management team that it was more cost effective to have the patch incorporated into the main project than it was to maintain it separately.
Working with an interdisciplinary team, Moore worked to set up an open source advisory council, which consisted of legal and technical subject matter experts. They reviewed contributions and created internal guidelines focused on good open source practices and community building. In 2013, when they started tracking these contributions, they had 13. This year, they plan to do almost 10x that.
“When companies establish open source practices they send a big message saying that we’re serious about open source and that we want to invest in it,” said Nithya Ruff, Senior Director of the Open Source Practice at Comcast (@nithyaruff).
Read more at The Linux Foundation
