Open Source in the Customer Portal

The Customer Portal engineering team understands the benefit of the open source way. Though we develop a good bit of software that is custom, proprietary, and internal to Red Hat, we do so using many open source tools and technologies. This document catalogs those items as well as the various ways our engineers give back to upstream communities.

Community Promise

This engineering team's first goal is to deliver value to our stakeholders. As Red Hatters, we understand that doing things the open source way is often the shortest path to great results. At times, however, contribution takes extra effort. Our promise to our peers is to default to doing things "in the community" and contribute as much as possible, even when it takes marginally more effort. As a team, product owners, developers, and other stakeholders will evaluate larger contributions (such as net new development, large modules, and package maintenance) on a case-by-case basis to ensure that our work in various communities does not slow our delivery unacceptably. To that end, here are some guidelines for the team:

• There is no explicit time set aside for community hacking—if and where you contribute on your own personal time is up to you!
• Consider community concerns (patch submission, cost of forking, etc.) when grooming user stories.
• If there's something you think needs a nudge or additional work to fully open source, add it to the proper backlog and add the tag Community Debt.
• Default to open.