You'd miss a lot of really good people with that standard. I used to work at Amazon, so I'll use them as an example. (Keep in mind, it's been about 1.5 years

You'd miss a lot of really good people with that standard. I used to work at Amazon, so I'll use them as an example. (Keep in mind, it's been about 1.5 years since I left, so some of this may have changed.) Amazon has a policy that requires you to get open source contributions approved by legal. That is, legal has to review every commit you want to put into open source to make sure 'it's not in a competing product', reviews can take weeks, and when you ask a lawyer every product is competing. The whole company is built off of Open Source, but there are teams the fork the projects into internal repositories (Perforce when I left) and put a bunch of Amazon-specific 'things' into them. As a developer there, I didn't use the Open Source sites, docs, or mailing lists at all -- I used Amazon's. We had wiki's, ticket queues, and mailing lists -- all internal to Amazon. Maybe the core team that's doing the forking and merging from the trunk would or does contribute back, but for any given project >99% of the developers at Amazon don't ever work on that codebase -- or with the codebase of any of these projects. As a developer, we just have a 'team' somewhere that does. If something doesn't work in Tomcat, we don't go find the Apache page and file a bug, or jump on the mailing group, we file a trouble ticket with the team that owns Tomcat at Amazon, and they fix it. Maybe they go to the Apache pages and mailing list, or maybe they just see the line of code in the codebase and fix it, I have no idea.