4 ms·
Giant companies consistently rather vendor the open source code they ingest rather than give back. Of course Google, Facebook etc have given back a lot to OSS.
by an_opabinia 6y ago
Giant companies consistently rather vendor the open source code they ingest rather than give back.
Of course Google, Facebook etc have given back a lot to OSS. Just not extemporaneously to when they received the value. It may be years until the internal rebuild of something some guy copied from somewhere is rereleased.
Git was designed for OSS. That includes its radically transparent form of development. Then again with submodules you can easily vendor your private stuff, rather than doing things the other way around.
- CJefferson 6y agoI have sympathy -- I "vendor" some libraries as I need to change something deep in the library. It's often not nice, and not something upstream would want.
- joshuamorton 6y agoThis isn't really true. The Google oss policies (opensource.google) require that you use a recent version. As a result upatreaming functional changes is encouraged and easier than maintaining a local patch set. Sometimes there are local changes but they're usually non functional stuff to make the library integrate with google infra. They do vendor, but that's for security and efficiency reasons mostly, not to avoid giving back.