SymfonyCon Berlin - why businesses must contribute to open source

At Deeson we use Symfony to build robust applications - it’s a popular open source framework that has a passionate community and documentation to go with it. It provides our developers with the tools they need to create quality enterprise-level web applications.

Chris Jansen, one of our developers, presented a keynote address at SymfonyCon Berlin 2016 at the beginning of December with Jeffrey A. “Jam” McGuire, Evangelist at Acquia. It was the fourth edition of the event, and the five days included two days of workshops, a two-day conference, and a hackday. Symfony event hackdays are a chance for developers to sit down together and contribute to the Symfony framework and other open source software projects.

Contribution itself was the topic Jansen and McGuire were talking about at SymfonyCon. Although essential to the survival of open source, it remains a challenge for many developers to get the companies they work for to provide paid support. At the moment, businesses around the world aren’t doing enough in this area, and they are certainly missing out in terms of innovation in the long term.

It’s a subject close to our heart at Deeson and an area where we put our money where our mouth is. Our agency gives paid time for developers to contribute to open-source projects. For example, we pay one of our Drupal developers, Kristiaan Van den Eynde, to work on the Drupal Group module one day a week. Our ability to support him doing this work accelerates the pace of development and means that a release candidate is expected by the end of the year - so in just a few weeks!

The slides from the talk can be found here. We’ll be publishing more from Chris and Jam that will be useful for anybody who wants to learn more about the value of open source development contribution and how to get about doing it.

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