Contributing to Projects with Paid Hosting

Contributing to an open source project that offers paid hosting is usually just like contributing to any other open source project.

In some cases, the company offering paid hosting may have private patches or tooling they use to offer additional functionality to hosting customers, or to make hosting more efficient. The source code for that software may or may not be public, and may or may not be available under the open source license for the project more generally. If you are trying to address a problem with a hosted instance of the software, and the problem doesn’t seem to be part of the open source code, consider asking the developer whether the problem might be in their private code.