The pattern that I see emerging now is that companies treat Open Source as a way of offseting software maintenance cost. They will create something for their in

The pattern that I see emerging now is that companies treat Open Source as a way of offseting software maintenance cost. They will create something for their internal use, and once product is feature complete and relatively stable, they will open source it, so that they can receive free bugfixes, which I guess they merge upstream. Some examples include Google with Kubernetes, Netflix with their cloud tooling (Eureka, Ribbon, etc.), LinkedIn with Kafka, Yahoo! with Hadoop, and many others.