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"Sending them bugfixes for free" is both a benefit and a burden to an open source project. It takes maintainer time and effort to review the fix, test, make rel
by kam 5y ago
"Sending them bugfixes for free" is both a benefit and a burden to an open source project. It takes maintainer time and effort to review the fix, test, make releases, etc, and that's a thankless job. When a company pushes their patches upstream, they're gaining a benefit for themselves (avoiding maintaining a fork), and potentially benefiting any other users who might be affected by the bug or want the same feature. But they're also adding to a maintainer's workload, and that's often the scarcest resource in open source.
- WJW 5y agoFair enough, but I didn't mean sending in bugfixes because I need it for my employer, I meant sending in bugfixes (or features) to a project that I wanted to make because it bothered me. For example, some time ago I sent in a patch to use better data structures in an event loop library that I think is cool but otherwise don't use. Should OSS devs optimize for my (probably quite rare) use case? Probably not, but the feeling when making a patch for something that I like is still different when the maintainer runs it as a business compared to when they run it as a hobby. (This is what the whole discussion seems to be about btw. Some people like to program in their free time as a hobby and other people would REALLY like guarantees about the software that cannot be made without losing the essential hobby-ness of it)