You may have the power of the pocket book. By applying funding intelligently, you can be instrumental in the initiation and growth of important open source projects.

The best implementations of this idea are when an initial high investment is followed by a low and ongoing investment that remains relatively level or linear in progression. As the project grows, your relative investment grows at a fraction of the rate of the overall project; this is where the low-investment, high-return of open source contribution occurs.

Another interesting implementation is when you can direct ''other'' organization's funds at open source.

By learning from when your investment does not pay off, such as ongoing high-investment with not enough return, you gain value from mistakes made.

For example, the NSA partnered with Red Hat to work on getting SELinux upstream in the Linux kernel. The NSA goal was to have Red Hat bake SELinux in to a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) package that US Government agencies could procur. While Red Hat was making a technology bet that included hiring key and unique developers from the communities, it was also helping the NSA to direct their efforts in the open community.

Back to the idea of spending your own money, there are a number of key technologies and projects that stand-alone now, but owe some initial lifeblood to market interests. At Red Hat, these include: GNOME; XEN virtualization and the advancement of virt under Linux (libvirt, oVirt, etc.); RPM.

For a more comprehensive list, refer to http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Red_Hat_contributions.