"A community around the source" is not the biggest benefit of commercial open source. Before "whole features implemented by outsiders" factors in, you already have:
* Drastically increased enterprise adoption because influencers w/o purchasing authority can download and do their own pilot deployments.
* Free testing, with drastically decreased expectations of release quality (it's open source, what do you expect? &c).
* The ability to market on the warm-fuzzy of "open source", which warm-fuzzy also includes the pragmatic issue of "what if you go out of business" (you still have the source).
I think the reality of a lot of open source projects, particularly in the enterprise, is that the vast majority of the real code is written by a small affiliated core team.
* Drastically increased enterprise adoption because influencers w/o purchasing authority can download and do their own pilot deployments.
* Free testing, with drastically decreased expectations of release quality (it's open source, what do you expect? &c).
* The ability to market on the warm-fuzzy of "open source", which warm-fuzzy also includes the pragmatic issue of "what if you go out of business" (you still have the source).
I think the reality of a lot of open source projects, particularly in the enterprise, is that the vast majority of the real code is written by a small affiliated core team.