Perforce’s Approach to Open-Source Communities

Perforce has been contributing and working in open source for decades now. We understand that open source is the linchpin for technology that supports businesses today. Our approach to open source is not unique to the industry at large or a company of our size (we have around 1,700 employees and 800 are on my team), but questions of our approach to open source became much more visible when we acquired Puppet – which has a really dedicated open-source community and a long history with open source.

We wanted to take the time to discuss how Perforce actively supports open source, what a healthy open-source community looks like, and the business benefits Perforce receives by supporting healthy communities – full transparency, we are a business.

How Perforce Actively Supports Open Source

There are three main components for how we support the larger open-source ecosystem today.

• Contribute: Our engineers, project managers and other members of our technical staff are active contributors to various open-source projects and have also started several open-source projects. Our team dedicates their time to ensure various projects have the support they need to continue to thrive.
• Foundation Members: We are members of several well-established open-source foundations, e.g. The Linux Foundation and Eclipse Foundation, as members we support these open-source projects not only through actively contributing to some of the projects but by also providing financial support.  
• Corporate Steward: We act as a corporate steward of the Puppet community. We have developers and engineers at Perforce actively contributing to the open-source project and we have a community lead at Perforce dedicated to Puppet, David Sandilands. 

We believe in a holistic approach to community support and as the leader of our research and development team, it’s essential for us to do our best to continue to support open-source projects to fuel our innovation and the security and safety of our customers. I am unbelievably proud of the team and their dedication to these endeavors. 

Perforce’s Perspective on a Healthy Community

Open-source communities change and shift, some members stay for the long run and others are only there for a bit, but we think there’s really three pillars that continue to help a community thrive and ensure its health. 

A healthy community is made up of many types of members. When you work within open source, there will be various member types. A few common ones include vendors (like us), ecosystem partners, consultants, champions/evangelists, contributors, new users, tech enthusiasts – this list can go on. Some members might fit into multiple categories. All will come with different perspectives and strategies to help push the community forward. 

A thriving community evolves. As technologists we must evolve. We believe that nostalgia does not drive us forward. Markets change, tooling & expectations change – we need to embrace this change with openness and dedication to evolve in a way that ensures technology and communities thrive in the future.

A healthy community is built on trust, credibility, contribution, feedback, and professionalism. Without this all else fails. This is very important for us when we participate in open-source communities and when we work with the Puppet community. For Puppet specifically, we create open channels of communication to receive feedback on how we can continually improve on this and remain professional above all else.

The Business Benefit of a Thriving Community

Investing in a community isn’t just about doing the right thing. We invest in open-source communities (and Puppet in particular) as a corporation because we do benefit from this investment in several ways:

Innovation: A community can accelerate the pace of innovation and create a competitive edge for a business. This manifests itself in many ways from code contributions, the exchange of code, skills and knowledge, and fast and honest feedback loops. 

Champions and Advocates: A healthy community builds champions and advocates for technologies and the industry at large. It can help attract talent to a company (like Perforce), advocates can build awareness of different technologies and newer applications of technologies, and they can foster growth in new users, more users, advanced users.

Everyone contributes to open source for a multitude of reasons, but we hope that if you actively contribute to Puppet, you are getting the following:

• Exchange of code, skills and knowledge
• Professional development
• Comradery
• Influence and recognition
• Purpose

At the end of the day, behind Perforce, there are people who are doing their best to ensure we support the open-source communities that help us in our everyday work and our business in general. We will continue to engage, grow and support the communities we are a part of.