It's sad to see software companies building walls up to keep others out, instead to pull them down and use the power of a wider community to push their products to a better place.
If the parent company of any given software sees itself as project lead, and welcomes collaboration from outside groups and individuals, the benefits would be enormous. The quality of the software would be greater, and far easier to assure with more people in and out of the company working on it to make sure it works as it should.
Also the investment needed to keep it working would be lower, since many coders could choose to contribute their time in order to patch and service the software as needed. While making many users more loyal, since they know that their voices are being heard in order to make change, add or subtract functionalities, or simply what should be corrected first.
If companies actually took the time to build inclusive communities to build their software, and hardware, everybody would benefit greatly. Companies would have a better product to offer, developers would have better tools to work with, and users would benefit from a better software that is constantly being updated and is robustly built.
People respond better when they feel that they are heard, and that they are part of something bigger. And letting them become part of the community around the software they use, it creates a far better user experience.
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