Appendix D. How to contribute to Liferay
Liferay Portal is an open source project. Yes, it has a company behind it that supports it and provides training, documentation, consulting services, and anything else you might imagine to foster its use and help people be successful with it. But it also has a vibrant community of thousands of users and developers who contribute to the product and help make it better by writing the features they need—which are likely also the features you need—and then contributing those features back to the product. This successful mixture of a commercial entity and open source works because open source as a philosophy of how to do software is something that the founders of the company (and many of the employees, like me) believe in at the core of our being.
I can’t point to just one thing that won me over to the open source mindset. I switched to Linux when Windows 98 kept crashing and making me lose my data. I moved from proprietary systems over to the Java world to escape being placed in the same niche as the products in which I had expertise. And I can’t tell you how many times an open source project has saved my bacon in various projects over the years. But for the founders of Liferay, it goes deeper than that.