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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 havin
by 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 agoThat 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 agoIn 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 agoI 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 agoSure, 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.