What is your advice for engineers coming from the enterprise to the open source market?

[edias]

What would you recommend for engineers with large experience (15 years +) on the enterprise market(banks, telecoms, etc) that would like to get more involved on open source projects?

How would you compare and differentiate the skills required to operate on the open source and enterprise market? Is it one harder than the other or just different?

[mxcl]

Mostly it's just engineering, but open source generally also requires you to:

• Have a feel for marketing
• Do the documentation
• Understand Developer Experience (DX)
• Understand versioning for end-developers
• Understand the full product experience

I usually am my first end user that leads me to the idea for a project, if it starts to feel like something I can generalize to a wider community I then start thinking about the other bullet points.