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> The vast majority of users are simply "throwing issues over the wall" without trying to contribute any fixes or discussion. > I would love to live in a world

> The vast majority of users are simply "throwing issues over the wall" without trying to contribute any fixes or discussion. > I would love to live in a world where everyone attempted to produce more than they consume, but we just aren't there. We're not going to get there, either. The number of users with the time available to dig in any depth into an issue they find is always going to be dwarfed by the total number of users contributing issues. That number in turn is dwarfed by the number of users who don't even go that far, and just work around problems they find (probably by silently switching to an alternative product). This isn't a moral issue, it's simple economics.

johan_larson 10y ago
True. I would expect most of the outsider contributions to an open source project to come from organizations that use the product heavily, to the point of having an internal support group responsible for it. That group is likely to have the expertise, time, and motivation to make actual updates to the product.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  That is very hard to do. Usually you have to fight for the right to contribute back, which in big companies means lots of fun with upper management layers and legal department before you get the green light to do that little pull request. So in my career I have seen lots of open source being used at Fortune 500, sometimes with internal forks of bug fixes and zero contributions being done back.
  - johan_larson 10y ago
    > That is very hard to do. Yes it is. But once you start making serious changes to the source-code, it's probably less painful than trying to deal with all the merge conflicts from your own fixes every time you upgrade to a new version. At some point it's just easier to push all of that stuff to the common version.
    - pjmlp 10y ago
      In all those cases I was aware of, the versions were never upgraded, they were frozen to the one used when the project started.
      - johan_larson 10y ago
        I don't know the details, but the teams at Google responsible for supporting their version of Linux and their C++ compiler sometimes mentioned making contributions to the common codebases. I got the impression they didn't make all of their fixes public, though.
        pjmlp 10y ago
        Sure, but companies like Google, Facebook and others are the outliers anyway. What matters are all those companies that no one heard of, or whose business has nothing to do with producing software.
wmccullough 10y ago
Totally agree with you here.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
"This isn't a moral issue, it's simple economics." I'm going to modify that a bit to say it's mostly economics but also barrier to entry. Wirth's Oberon etc work was designed to be easy to understand from language to architecture to tools. Students with little experience regularly ported it, redid it, and so on. I've seen similar in FOSS projects well-designed for easy understanding. I think many of these popular projects were not designed that way to the point the real and incidental (i.e. implementation) complexity is to high for most to justify time in. I know it is for me for several, major projects. So, we need to remember that. More FOSS being designed for contributors as much as users might increase number of contributions.
- tomcam 10y ago
  Profoundly true. Toolsets change so frequently these days that the bare minimum of instructions you often see on the homepage of a project are absolutely useless unless you already know that particular segment of the development arena intimately. Oberon is an absolutely spectacular example of the alternate universe you propose.

johan_larson 10y ago

True. I would expect most of the outsider contributions to an open source project to come from organizations that use the product heavily, to the point of having an internal support group responsible for it. That group is likely to have the expertise, time, and motivation to make actual updates to the product.

pjmlp 10y ago
That is very hard to do. Usually you have to fight for the right to contribute back, which in big companies means lots of fun with upper management layers and legal department before you get the green light to do that little pull request. So in my career I have seen lots of open source being used at Fortune 500, sometimes with internal forks of bug fixes and zero contributions being done back.
- johan_larson 10y ago
  > That is very hard to do. Yes it is. But once you start making serious changes to the source-code, it's probably less painful than trying to deal with all the merge conflicts from your own fixes every time you upgrade to a new version. At some point it's just easier to push all of that stuff to the common version.
  - pjmlp 10y ago
    In all those cases I was aware of, the versions were never upgraded, they were frozen to the one used when the project started.
    - johan_larson 10y ago
      I don't know the details, but the teams at Google responsible for supporting their version of Linux and their C++ compiler sometimes mentioned making contributions to the common codebases. I got the impression they didn't make all of their fixes public, though.
      - pjmlp 10y ago
        Sure, but companies like Google, Facebook and others are the outliers anyway. What matters are all those companies that no one heard of, or whose business has nothing to do with producing software.

wmccullough 10y ago

Totally agree with you here.

nickpsecurity 10y ago

"This isn't a moral issue, it's simple economics." I'm going to modify that a bit to say it's mostly economics but also barrier to entry. Wirth's Oberon etc work was designed to be easy to understand from language to architecture to tools. Students with little experience regularly ported it, redid it, and so on. I've seen similar in FOSS projects well-designed for easy understanding. I think many of these popular projects were not designed that way to the point the real and incidental (i.e. implementation) complexity is to high for most to justify time in. I know it is for me for several, major projects. So, we need to remember that. More FOSS being designed for contributors as much as users might increase number of contributions.

tomcam 10y ago
Profoundly true. Toolsets change so frequently these days that the bare minimum of instructions you often see on the homepage of a project are absolutely useless unless you already know that particular segment of the development arena intimately. Oberon is an absolutely spectacular example of the alternate universe you propose.