Frye also urged companies to get their legal team on board early. Since a company's developers will be contributing code, the legal team will want to ensure there are no violations of the company's intellectual property rights.

Also key, Frye said, is that you have to appraise work done by developers differently in the open source community. "We don't care whether someone gets their own code accepted" in an open source project, he said. "We care if we get out of the community code that we need."

Let someone else do it

Another panel member, Theodore Ts'o, an IBM technical staffer and a fellow and chief platform strategist at the Linux Foundation, urged a bit of caution for businesses that are considering jumping into the kernel development community.

"There are many, many options," Ts'o said. "You don't have to do it yourself." It can be very intimidating to jump into a kernel mailing list, which can receive 800 or more posts daily. "It's very daunting," he said.

What might work better for some enterprise users is to bring in a development partner to handle much of the community work, he said. "If people want to do it, I don't want to discourage them, but at the same time, I worry that they'll jump in and then jump out."

"It's like a car," Ts'o said. "Some people like to fix a car themselves. Some will go to a dealership and some will go to an independent repair shop."