You know:

I believe that most web developers are artists. 

We love to create; we love to express ourselves with code poetry.

And we love to do it on a “blank page.”

Everything from scratch…

‘Cause nobody would do it like us. 

That’s an awesome attitude and a totally unreasonable approach from a business angle.

Because no matter how good we think we are and no matter how big our department is…

And even if we don’t have any hard or soft deadlines…

We just can’t produce stable and well-tested software from scratch that matches the quality of an open-source project.

An open-source project that is the result of years upon years of massive collective effort.

I’m not talking about libraries and frameworks here.

Although there’re extreme cases I know where everything is done from a clean slate.

I’m talking about end products like support systems, CMSs, ERPs, etc.

Yeah, it’s somewhat “risky” to introduce 3rd-party code regularly, but that’s how it’s done today.

And it brings on the table huge benefits that outweigh by a wide margin the cons of losing some control over the codebase.

So “Open” and “Source” – that are the two magic words that make dev and business miracles happen:

Fast, Easy, and Profitably.