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> Their engineers are prohibited from contributing back to the ecosystem Things have changed and this is no longer true. A significant number of projects recei

by thamer 4y ago

> Their engineers are prohibited from contributing back to the ecosystem Things have changed and this is no longer true. A significant number of projects receive frequent contributions from Apple engineers. The majority of active committers on Apache Cassandra are at Apple for example, contributing major features such as a new transactional system[1]. My team actively contributes to Spinnaker, and we're currently hiring someone with a focus on open-source contributions, quoting the second "key qualification" in the job listing[2]: "Interest in developing with open source software and contributing back to the community". [1] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CASSANDRA/CEP-15%3A+General+Purpose+Transactions https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/CASSANDRA/CEP-15... [2] https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200361051/apple-cloud-platform-continuous-delivery-backend-engineer?team=SFTWR https://jobs.apple.com/en-us/details/200361051/apple-cloud-p...

varispeed 4y ago
> Interest in developing with open source software and contributing back to the community That's a bit odd phrasing, that has guilt undertone. Individuals are unlikely using open source for personal financial gain, but somehow this sounds like they actually "owe" something, kind of shifting the blame from corporations that are actually making money with open source software and often not paying contributors anything. Also hiring someone to contribute to open source, makes that person likely represent interest of the corporation rather than the project they will contribute to and these are not always aligned. It also takes time of maintainers to actually review and gauge value and viability of the contribution rather than actually spending time on development of the project. I think much better idea to "contribute back" is to actually pay the existing contributors rather than having own pet one.
- thamer 4y ago
  I didn't write the job listing, but I understand it as being interested in OSS contributions, maybe already being a contributor to some projects. > hiring someone to contribute to open source, makes that person likely represent interest of the corporation That's true, and this is why my team is active within the project by having a member on the Technical Oversight Committee and several others in SIGs. The point is not to push our own agenda, we have made a lot of changes that are mainly relevant to our use cases and that don't necessarily make sense to upstream. Whenever we work on features that we know others would benefit from, we engage with the project's relevant committees and make the changes requested in pull request reviews. To be clear, I don't speak for my employer and this is only my own experience. Not all teams are like this. > I think much better idea to "contribute back" is to actually pay the existing contributors rather than having own pet one. Contributing features and supporting existing contributors in other ways are not incompatible. We have a whole team working on this code base full time, and so do other companies. Of course all of these people collaborate. This project is not really run by volunteers but mostly receives contributions from a number of companies (originally created at Netflix, large parts came from Google, etc). edit: See TOS members here for a list of the companies involved: https://cd.foundation/blog/2022/11/01/new-spinnaker-technical-oversight-committee-announced-at-spinnaker-summit-2022/ https://cd.foundation/blog/2022/11/01/new-spinnaker-technica...

by thamer 4y ago

varispeed 4y ago

> Interest in developing with open source software and contributing back to the community That's a bit odd phrasing, that has guilt undertone. Individuals are unlikely using open source for personal financial gain, but somehow this sounds like they actually "owe" something, kind of shifting the blame from corporations that are actually making money with open source software and often not paying contributors anything. Also hiring someone to contribute to open source, makes that person likely represent interest of the corporation rather than the project they will contribute to and these are not always aligned. It also takes time of maintainers to actually review and gauge value and viability of the contribution rather than actually spending time on development of the project. I think much better idea to "contribute back" is to actually pay the existing contributors rather than having own pet one.

thamer 4y ago
I didn't write the job listing, but I understand it as being interested in OSS contributions, maybe already being a contributor to some projects. > hiring someone to contribute to open source, makes that person likely represent interest of the corporation That's true, and this is why my team is active within the project by having a member on the Technical Oversight Committee and several others in SIGs. The point is not to push our own agenda, we have made a lot of changes that are mainly relevant to our use cases and that don't necessarily make sense to upstream. Whenever we work on features that we know others would benefit from, we engage with the project's relevant committees and make the changes requested in pull request reviews. To be clear, I don't speak for my employer and this is only my own experience. Not all teams are like this. > I think much better idea to "contribute back" is to actually pay the existing contributors rather than having own pet one. Contributing features and supporting existing contributors in other ways are not incompatible. We have a whole team working on this code base full time, and so do other companies. Of course all of these people collaborate. This project is not really run by volunteers but mostly receives contributions from a number of companies (originally created at Netflix, large parts came from Google, etc). edit: See TOS members here for a list of the companies involved: https://cd.foundation/blog/2022/11/01/new-spinnaker-technical-oversight-committee-announced-at-spinnaker-summit-2022/ https://cd.foundation/blog/2022/11/01/new-spinnaker-technica...