I'm comparatively new to SAP; I lead our open source research efforts. I have always believed, looking at SAP from the outside, that she benefitted significantly from shipping ABAP source code to partners and customers, as early as 25 years ago.
The main reason for shipping code, of course, was that customers and partners could adapt the system to their needs. We may have any number of parameter tables and configuration tools, but in the end, the truth is in the code. So we needed to ship it.
I have never programmed in ABAP nor do I know SE80 or the like too well. However, I wonder, how openly have customers shared code with SAP? I know what folks tell me internally, but I'm asking you, the reader, whether you had any experiences of sending code back to SAP or showing SAP how to do things better than we were originally doing it? And if you did so, did we pick up on it?
Academics call it user innovation. Smart users who work with what's given to them and sometimes come up with better solutions than the original one.
I'd love to hear your stories.
