Why and how-to contribute to libre software when you integrate them into an in-house application ?

In the paper titled “Why and how-to contribute to libre software when you integrate them into an in-house application ?” (which is now available online), to be published in the forecoming proceedings of the OSS2005 conference (Genova, Italy, 11-15 july 2005), we draw from our experience on the projects PicoLibre and ProGET, to explain how in-house applications can be built around existing high level libre software programs. We also describe the issue of long-term maintenance of such in-house platforms, and we propose a strategy for contributions to external libre projects, in order to help solve the maintenance issue.

Feel free to comment on this paper in this post.

Update : the full proceedings of the conference have been put on-line. Check the details from http://oss2005.case.unibz.it/