For a lot of developers SAP is a strange company. We are used to get all information we need online, getting development docs, samples or systems. A lot of companies are successful because of their open source software. Sure, there are services out there we use eg. Jira, GitHub, … But when it comes to development we develop against open source software.
SAP changed a bit in the last month. Of course we don’t get the NetWeaver Platform for free, but SAP – or the employees – of SAP putted a lot of Software on GitHub . One of the mayor projects is OpenUI5 (with GitHub repository). The way how SAP structured the projects is a bit unusual, but in my opinion they are going into the right direction.
An other project are the RubyGem MaxDB JDBC driver and MaxDB ActiveRecord Adapter. With these wo you can use Ruby on Rails with the SAP MaxDB. Some of the code is very SAP specific and pretty useless for people outside SAP, but it is a very good starting for the company and maybe it changes the way how they are doing their business in the next years.
Maybe it is a good idea for SAP to hire a community manager with experience in open source communities. We will see what the future brings.
“Of course we don’t get the NetWeaver Platform for free”
That’s not entirely true, developer trial versions of Netweaver have been available for download for years.
http://scn.sap.com/community/developer-center/abap
http://scn.sap.com/docs/DOC-41566
There is even a virtual appliance available, which of course will cost you money to host but saves you all the hassle of preparing a VM etc.