IBM released 50 projects to the open-source community, including analytics packages and e-commerce apps. The move isn’t purely altruistic; in order to access the code, developers must head to developerWorks Open, an IBM cloud portal. As it retools its business to focus more on cloud-based services and apps, IBM needs a robust developer community to help it build things that customers actually want to use. But what exactly will developers get out of these projects? For those looking to build out their infrastructure with off-the-shelf analytics modules, actually quite a bit, from an agentless system crawler to a simple metrics collector to node application metrics (which allow developers and data scientists to collect monitoring data for Node.js-based applications). In addition, there are data-management modules (such as the Gaian Database, a lightweight data-federation technology), IBM design tool kits, and even a flow editor for uniting hardware devices, APIs, and online services (i.e., the so-called Internet of Things). Any developer who contributes, of course, needs to follow any Contributor’s License Agreement (CLA) listed in the project’s Github repository; and even if there’s no need for a signed CLA, IBM wants developers to leave a pull-request comment detailing the contribution.