The majority of CNCF contributions come from large international corporations or vendors.

At my workplace, we are a CNCF End-User, and we have a team of ~10 developers. However, we find great value in allocating time and company resources to participating in open-source communities that form part of our supply chain.

Contributing to open-source is not an act of charity; the business sees greater value in return than the raw staff cost.

This talk outlines our technical and commercial rationale for involvement, despite our modest engineering capacity. Benefits include security vulnerabilities, advocating project advancements, and using it as a learning and coaching experience for developers of all levels. However, there are also some challenges.

We have become recurring contributors to several large projects over the years and now even hold maintainer positions in a couple of them.