Lead generation by maintaining open source side project

Do some of you maintain an open source project in order to boost brand awareness of your core SaaS product?

Example:
A company's core product is a SaaS platform for mobile app bug reporting. They developed a great open-source library for iOS that lives solely on Github/Cocoapods. They figured out that 28% of the total incoming traffic to the core product landing page comes from the open-source lib Github repo. They also measured that the users coming from the repo, go through the sales funnel most effectively, and convert better than organic search visitors.