“If you have the chops, your open source software project should
lead and inform your commercial product. Red Hat and Ubuntu have
done this brilliantly. Fedora precedes RHEL. Feisty goes before
supported Gutsy. Both companies have rabid communities who gobble
new code and contribute back fixes and improvements. The developer
communities are happy to get cool new stuff. The commercial guys
get better fit and finish. The early users are often the production
guys as well, so they value early experience and use it to
influence the production code. It’s a quality loop and better for
everybody…”