As a corollary, I submit that companies relying on open source, after having reached a sufficient size and stature, have a civic responsibility to contribute code to the open source community. In addition to the purely altruistic aspect of such a move, founding an open source project has the side benefit of attracting similar minded folks to your project and potentially your company as well. See, e.g., Netflix OSS as an example of how to do this correctly. http://netflix.github.io/