Open Source advocates are stunned, just stunned, that large users of OSS contribute very little back into the pool:

Chase Phillips used to spend up to 100 hours a week writing code for the Firefox browser. Bruce Momjian, a former teacher, manages the E-mail list for contributors to the PostgreSQL database. Brian McCallister spends evenings and weekends working on projects for the Apache Software Foundation. Swedish engineer Peter Lundblad labors over Subversion, a change management system for distributed development, at night "when the children are sleeping and my wife watches TV."

This spirit of volunteerism is alive and well in the world of open source software. Thousands of people donate their time and expertise to the benefit of all. But not everyone is giving as much as they're getting. Large companies, those with the greatest wherewithal to help, are surprisingly minor players in the roll-up-your-sleeves work of open source development.

Big companies are "great consumers of open source. They're very good at pushing the limits of what open source code can do," says Carl Drisko, leader of the data center consulting practice at Novell, which distributes SUSE Linux. But when it comes to pounding out code, Drisko says, "they don't have a lot of people contributing back."

I think a big round of "Duhhh" is in order here. Corporate software development is about solving business problems, not about writing extra code. Sure, there are plenty of shops that have gotten into death marches, where tons of useless code got written - but even there, the code was allegedly useful to the business. Releasing code back out to OSS projects runs into two big hurdles:

• The "who owns it?" dilemma. Most companies operate under the assumption that code written at work belongs to the company. That means that releasing code out to the public requires signoff from legal (and likely, management). Most people shake their heads and think - "not going there"
• IT developers are trying hard to get their projects done. Doing extra work to make code accessible (and available) to external projects isn't in the budget or timeline

This isn't specific to Open Source. Most IT shops don't do blue sky work for any set of tools they use, open source or proprietary. There's always a small community of interested parties willing to commit code back to a vendor or project - but it's a small community. There are reasons for that, which I'll illustrate with another quote:

But contributions from businesses are small, partly because of a cultural divide between the open source crowd and corporate software developers, says Brian Behlendorf, co-founder of the Apache Web Server project and CTO at software company CollabNet. In contrast to the bottom line business world, Behlendorf says, open source developers exhibit a "willingness to challenge authority, the passion to work on an interesting problem well past the end of the workday, and the time and space to be able to build the right solution to a problem rather than just the most expedient."

It has very little to do with the "bottom line business world" in terms of extra work. Stuff done on the job - sure, there are hurdles, which I outlined above. After work? Most developers have these things called "lives". Maybe Behlendorf should look into that before he comes up with silly explanations. Most people who work in software are not into software to the exclusion of all else. Contrary to the TV stereotypes, most of them have other interests and activities that fill their non-working hours.

The bottom line is, don't expect more than a relative handful of people to contribute non-paid hours to projects, open source or otherwise.