9 ms·

Giving up upstream-ing my patches and feel free to pick them up

179 points by csmantle 9mo ago

pjm331 9mo ago
I have this theory that with LLMs getting better at writing code our current open source model (relatively few large projects that everyone contributes to, relatively rare to maintain your own fork) will invert and it will be easier and more common for people to have personalized forks and a lot of the problems around managing large open source projects will just become irrelevant
- majormajor 9mo ago
  Or a ton of "personalized agents" will start bugging upstream to complain about suspected issues with all those forks all the time...
- mort96 9mo ago
  Why would you want to manage your own fork of everything?
  - voakbasda 9mo ago
    Because that cost can be less than dealing with upstream.
beart 9mo ago
I know Java has a complicated history of ownership, but I'm not sure I understand why Oracle is able to block contributions to OpenJDK. I thought the point of OpenJDK was to be separate from Oracle. I'm not a Java developer, just curious how this works.
- oliwarner 9mo ago
  It's still their project and the Oracle Contributor Agreement means they get to asset joint ownership of your contributions. That's broadly the point of CLAs, but for a beefy project like OpenJDK with so much shared code baked deep into enterprise deployment, Oracle will feel it's critical they can pull freely given code into the depths of their closed Java builds. It's their project. It does absolutely block contributions (employers are unhappy sacrificing their engineering output to Oracle). If you don't like it, fork it.
  - mort96 9mo ago
    So TL;DR I'm right to be skeptical of everything Java because even OpenJDK is pretty much owned and controlled by Oracle? Good to know. I'll keep avoiding it like the plague then, with slightly more confidence:
    - mindcrime 9mo ago
      Not really. OpenJDK is exactly what OpenJDK is, and there are plenty of builds provided by other vendors who have nothing to do with Oracle. All Oracle "owning" it really means is that they basically have unilateral ability to make changes to Java[1], where said changes will be reflected in their official binary releases. And they charge for their releases (and have some auditing / licensing terms which many find off-putting) which is only important if it's really important for you to use an Official Oracle Build for some reason, as opposed to Eclipse Temurin, Amazon Corretto, BellSoft Liberica, Red Hat's build, etc. Personally I just use the OpenJDK builds provided by my linux distro and never give it a second thought. [1]: And so far, Oracle haven't shown much, if any, propensity for abusing their control of Java. There's a process and they seem to mostly stick to it.
      - mort96 9mo ago
        Dude, Oracle controls who can contribute. I don't understand how you can say it has nothing to do with Oracle.
        oliwarner 9mo ago
        Well, kind of. Oracle might only accept upstream contributions but OpenJDK is GPL2, so anyone can host their fork of OpenJDK with whatever GPL2-licensed patches they like, regardless of the OCA/CLA being signed. Indeed there are enough distributions of OpenJDK that there's a site for picking which is best for you. I can't really speak to how current that information is, or how good it is, but it exists: https://whichjdk.com/ https://whichjdk.com/ But yes, you might be right to be suspect of Java as a whole if this is how they treat contributors. It's worth noting that many larger open source projects have contributor agreements to strengthen their rights for redistribution that a standard license might not cover. What if they want to change the license? They don't want to be hamstrung by a million contributions. Moral rights are something you often see. And severability might also be a concern. Some like the OCA are worse than others. The Python one is pretty good because it limits any future relicensing to open source. https://www.python.org/psf/contrib/contrib-form/ https://www.python.org/psf/contrib/contrib-form/
- gf000 9mo ago
  Where does oracle block contributions? This was more of an unfortunate lack of attention/prioritization. Don't assume malice where a simpler explanation exists.
  - deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  - beart 9mo ago
    I assumed nothing.
- grishka 9mo ago
  OpenJDK is the "default" implementation of Java and it's maintained by Oracle. Beyond that, there exists at least OpenJ9, which is a completely independent implementation, maintained by Eclipse Foundation.
  - lmz 9mo ago
    Isn't OpenJ9 "just" the VM and not the class library? Also it's IBM-backed so it's more a case of pick your poison there.
- themafia 9mo ago
  Corporations love open source when it delivers working code to their doorstep. They hate open source when it comes to actually maintaining and managing a community of developers who really do care about and use the core product. So they create draconian "agreements" and "codes" to tilt the playing field entirely in their favor. It's entirely antithetical to the whole idea of open source. These projects should be ruthlessly forked and all corporate development efforts ignored.
  - bruce511 9mo ago
    I'll be honest, I'm not sure why you're aggrieved here. There's absolutely nothing in the "idea of Open Source" that suggests upstream has to accept contributions. Open Source allows you to tinker with the code, not force your changes on others. Equally you are welcome to not sign anything you font want to sign. There are reasons for those docs, there are reasons to not sign them. It's completely your choice. And of course you are free to fork anything anytime you like. You're even free to encourage others. So no beef there. I presume you have at least followed your in principles here? I'm guessing you have forked Linux, and your browser, and your favorite language? And office suite? Posting links here would likely attract others who object to corporate development joining you.
    - themafia 9mo ago
      > that suggests upstream has to accept contributions Which is why I said they should be forked. There's nothing that suggests "upstream" has any actual significance. > I presume you have at least followed your in principles here? Yes. Thanks for asking. I appreciate questions in good faith. > I'm guessing you have forked Linux, and your browser, and your favorite language? Hmm.. do I have to sign an agreement to contribute to those? I'm not sure I have. Is this actually comparable? > Posting links here would likely attract others who object to corporate development joining you. That's sweet of you.
  - re-thc 9mo ago
    > These projects should be ruthlessly forked and all corporate development efforts ignored. Please do and show that it can be sustainable. It’s easy to complain at home. It’s hard to actually keep it going.
- M95D 9mo ago
  This is very common in all open source projects, not just Java/Oracle.
  - mort96 9mo ago
    It's not common for a random company to gatekeep contributions to a community project, and OpenJDK brands itself as a community project that's more or less independent from Oracle.
__turbobrew__ 9mo ago
I have been trying to upstream patches to kubernetes and etcd for about a year and ended up giving up. It is impossible to get someone from the project to review my PRs, and since I cannot get PRs under my belt I can not become a maintainer either. My suspicion is that you get ghosted if you don’t have a @google or @redhat email address and really the only way to become a contributor is to be buddies with someone who works on the project already. I have considered going to one of the CNCF committee meetings and being like, hey you guys are not accepting new contributions which goes against your mandate. But in the end I just maintain local patches that don’t get upstreamed which is easier.
- direwolf20 9mo ago
  The CNCF may or may not take it seriously. They definitely won't if they don't know.
- ahmedtd 9mo ago
  Can you link your PRs here? Kubernetes is such a huge project that there are few reviewers who would feel comfortable signing off an an arbitrary PR in a part of the codebase they are not very familiar with. It's more like Linux, where you need to find the working group (Kubernetes SIG) who would be a good sponsor for a patch, and they can then assign a good reviewer. (This is true even if you work for Google or Red Hat)
  - __turbobrew__ 9mo ago
    My PRs are submitted under my real name and my HN account is not under my real name, so I cannot share. For my etcd changes I did submit to the correct SIG, but nobody reviewed it.
- perfmode 9mo ago
  maybe you’ve already done this and I’m sorry if i’m telling you the obvious. You could analyze the repo to identify others who have modified the same files. and reach out to them specifically.
Freak_NL 9mo ago
[flagged]
- arglebarnacle 9mo ago
  Interesting, when I've come across this before I have always interpreted it as "not from Hong Kong", especially in a context like this where it's raised in the context of engaging with a western counterpart's potential suspicion. It's been my experience that westerners (I am a westerner) do have different assumptions about "mainland" Chinese people than people from Hong Kong who are assumed to be more cosmopolitan, "westernized", or even "politically neutral" from a western liberal capitalist perspective, so it seems reasonable to point it out in this context.
- ok123456 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - nine_k 9mo ago
    AFAICT both the Beijing's narrative and the Taipei narrative assume that "mainland China" and Taiwan should ideally be the same state, but the completely diverge in their notion of what state that should be: PRC or ROC.
- amluto 9mo ago
  > The phrase "Chinese Mainland" when used in English comes loaded with the suggestion that Taiwan is rightfully part of China For better or for worse, many people on both sides of the strait have used language along these lines that suggests that Taiwan is part of China for decades and probably even since a bit before 1949 (I was not alive at the time). I think that, at this point, the term “mainland China” is just the default. That being said, a person from China could just say they’re from China and no one would be confused. This is in contrast to someone saying they’re Chinese, which can be ambiguous.
- verall 9mo ago
  > The phrase "Chinese Mainland" when used in English comes loaded with the suggestion that Taiwan is rightfully part of China — it is an unavoidable implication. I'm really curious - what people did you get this idea from? I've never heard this before. I have heard "mainland China" to mean, specifically, "China, not Hong Kong or Macau", from: - Taiwanese people - Hong Kong people - Mainland Chinese people - Taiwanese-americans - Chinese-americans (immigrated from the mainland) It's just mainland China (大陆）. I have never met Chinese or Taiwanese people who feel this is a politically loaded term.
gavinray 9mo ago
I signed the OCA in 2021 as part of some contributions to GraalVM. The process was much more involved than anything I'd previously signed, and it was slow, but in my case eventually got approved. It mostly involved some emails with an actual human and PDF's to be docu-signed.
nubinetwork 9mo ago
Despite their OSS contributions, and the fact that they have their own Linux distro, oracle is one of the worst companies to deal with in terms of OSS. Very NIH syndrome, very gatekeep-y. I refuse to use grub because I know I'll never get bugs fixed since oracle claims ownership of the repo there as well.
- koutakun 9mo ago
  >I refuse to use grub because I know I'll never get bugs fixed since oracle claims ownership of the repo there as well. Wait what? Source on this? GRUB is supposed to be a GNU Project, I would've thought they'd rather die than accept any sort of Oracle ownership of it.
  - fao_ 9mo ago
    GNU GRUB is a GNU project, yes. No idea what OP is talking about https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/ https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
    - Phelinofist 9mo ago
      The maintainer section lists 2/3 maintainers being from Oracle -I guess thats what OP means
throwaway290 9mo ago
why do they waste all that ai writing new patches instead of helping them upstream existing patches?
andrewmcwatters 9mo ago
There is an inverse relationship with respect to the size of an organization or project and its authors or maintainers willingness to review and merge pull requests. The smaller a project, the more willing an author is to write the entire feature for you based on a plain request. Go help smaller projects, the big ones don't care that you've submitted any work at all.
xyst 9mo ago
I am not surprised. Oracle acquiring Sun Microsystems has been the death kneel of open source Java ecosystem. Never forget: One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison still runs this company.
_benj 9mo ago
Would there be a difference in contributing to OpenJDK vs to, say, Temurin or Zulu Java? How separated are those Java JDKs really from OpenJDK?
- embedding-shape 9mo ago
  Temurin and others are "distributions" of OpenJDK, basically their compilation results of it, not their own codebase. They're not "forks" in terms of source code, but they have patches, build systems, QA, and everything else around it that they apply, then offer you their version of it. OpenJDK: where Java is developed Temurin / Zulu: where OpenJDK is built, tested, packaged, and supported
  - _benj 9mo ago
    Thanks for the explanation!
Phelinofist 9mo ago
In a response Dalibor Topic claims that he rejected some of his submission have been rejected. So one of them is lying?
markus_zhang 9mo ago
Judging from the whole thread, might just be some misunderstanding of the workflow?
delusional 9mo ago
Any asipiring commentor should note that dalibor has responded, and it doesn't sound like he's unreasonable https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/hotspot-dev/2026-January/118083.html https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/hotspot-dev/2026-January/...
- simpaticoder 9mo ago
  And the OP responded too, apologizing for causing confusion https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/hotspot-dev/2026-January/118084.html https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/hotspot-dev/2026-January/...
bruce511 9mo ago
I confess, I'm an old guy, who was around when Open Source was still young. Being able to read the code, learn to be z better programmer, tweak it to my needs, control what was running on my machine. Reading other comments on this thread it seems like the mood has shifted. Now there seems to be an expectation that Open Source means "you should promptly review and accept my changes". There is much wailing that corporates (who, by the way, never used to release code at all) are somehow at fault for either existing, or not responding quick enough or requiring paperwork(!). I'm not sure when pushing code upstream to Open Source became an entitlement. I'm pretty sure it wasn't there at the beginning and it's nor part if any license I'm aware of.
- quesomaster9000 9mo ago
  I'm very much from the same era, "stfu and fork it", "PoC or GTFO". And as I got older, I realized "I am not the customer, there is no money in responding to me, I am a net negative cost to your business". And uhh... I'll shuffle the F out now then? And try and catch-up on 200 years of math. I don't think anything has changed IRL, aside from my knees hurting
  - burnt-resistor 9mo ago
    "Self-service doacracy" rather than "look at me and fix my 'world-ending' problem for me for free right now". While I applaud creating patches and submitting them upstream, there's zero obligation to review or accept them... just throw them out there and let whatever happens happen in its own time. It's my tailbone and an old torn back injury; I can't sit or stand for longer than 2 hours and I think I need to swap my Aeron classic size B for a C.
- burnt-resistor 9mo ago
  Most of Meta's groups' approach to FOSS is throwing piles of sticks over a wall. They don't even check code can build, that it doesn't have some internal-only dependencies, and don't even care if they break other groups' code. The timeline for very minor bug can also be on the order of months to years because everyone working at the business is focused on shipping "impact" to keep their job when the next performance review/layoff round comes along.
_rwo 9mo ago
Oh yeah, Oracle; if you want to see where contributions come die see mysql-operator - ton of stuff broken, pull request fixes (like most obvious, no-brain bugfixes) slurped into bugs.mysql.com oblivion never seeing the light of day
dwroberts 9mo ago
The PRs they link mostly seem like noise? “Remove the d prefix from this number because the C++ standard doesn’t require it”. Yeah great.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- jstanley 9mo ago
  That's a pretty unfair characterisation of the commit in question: https://github.com/loongson/jdk/pull/125/commits/ee300a6ce7348f77c2642f3a6b5b0c46d6117862 https://github.com/loongson/jdk/pull/125/commits/ee300a6ce73... By my reading, it's not merely that the standard doesn't require the "d" suffix, it's that the standard doesn't allow the "d" suffix, and the code won't compile on anything but gcc.
  - freedomben 9mo ago
    Agreed, although things I immediately think of are: 1. Is "anything but gcc" actually supported by the project? Do they have a goal of supporting other compilers or possibly an explicit decision not to support other compilers? 2. If they do support other compilers, how did the "d" suffix make it in the first place? That's something I would expect the dev or CI to catch pretty quickly. 3. Does gcc behave any differently with the "d" suffix not there? (I would think a core dev would know that off the top of their head, so it's possible they looked at it and decided it wasn't worth it. One would hope they'd comment on the PR though if they did that). If it does, this could introduce a really hard-to-track-down bug. I'm not defending Oracle here (in fact I hate Oracle and think they are a scourge on humanity) but trying to approach this with an objective look.
    - mort96 9mo ago
      Is the project clearly documented as being written in GNU C++ rather than standard C++? If not, anything that's accidentally invalid C++ is fair game for bug fixes, is it not?
    - 9mo ago
freedomben 9mo ago
All of the https://github.com/AOSC-Tracking/jdk/ https://github.com/AOSC-Tracking/jdk/ links 404 for me, so it's difficult to get a sense of what was being done. Going off of the "loongson fork" links though they look rather trivial. Not saying they should be ignored, but I do think trivial PRs to large critical open source projects like JDK can often end up taking more time away from contributing engineers doing reviews and testing than they are worth. I know first-hand the frustration of having PRs ignored and it can be quite demoralizing, so I do feel for the author. It sounds like the author is getting to a place of peace with it, and my advice from having been down that path before is to do exactly that, and find something else interesting to hack on.
- Cpoll 9mo ago
  But that's not what's happening here, right? They're blocked on having their 'Oracle Contributer Agreement' approved; they're not even at the stage where their PRs are eligible for being ignored.
  - what 9mo ago
    The email thread suggests his PRs were reviewed promptly and rejected. Nothing was ignored. https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/hotspot-dev/2026-January/118083.html https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/hotspot-dev/2026-January/...
    - evgpbfhnr 9mo ago
      iiuc, this mail isn't about his PRs being rejected, it's the OCA submission e.g. the CLA obtention form. (So his ping "any progress?" apparently fell on the wrong ears, if he wasn't told he had to submit a new application with something corrected...)
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- aeurielesn 9mo ago
  I disagree. Trivial PRs are perfect for first contributions, especially to get through the myriad of bots requesting you to sign/review stuff. Having said that, I would never contribute to a project with a first contributor experience like this one.
rendaw 9mo ago
Regardless of the contents, > For each of my emails, I got a reply, saying that they "sincerely apologize" and "@Dalibor Topic Can you please review...", with no actual progress being made. then > Sorry to hear this. .... @Dalibor Topic <dalibor.topic at oracle.com>, can we get this prioritized? This is pretty morbidly funny.
- softwaredoug 9mo ago
  Anyone who has been a freelancer negotiating a contract with a big company feels this sort of thing in their bones.
  - krater23 9mo ago
    Never had this issue. Its just as simple as start to work without contract and the promise of department head to get a contract and after two weeks mention to the contracting that you work since two weeks and have still not signed a NDA. Next sentence is: I don't fear to not get my money, but currently I don't know if you pay or someone else...
    - NooneAtAll3 9mo ago
      compiler error: `since(time_point_t)` cannot be called with `time_duration_t` were you trying to use `for(time_duration_t)` ?
voakbasda 9mo ago
When I want to contribute to an open source project, I throw together some trivial but useful patches and see how the project responds. Many projects behave this way, particularly those with corporate overlords. At best, it will take weeks to get a simple patch reviewed. By then, I have moved on, at least with my intention to send anything upstream. I commend the author for giving them a whole year, but I have found that is best a recipe for disappointment. Maintainers: how you react to patches and PRs significantly influence whether or not you get skilled contributors. When I was maintaining such projects, I always tried to reply within 24 hours to new contributors. It would be interesting to see how quickly the retention rate drops off as the time to review/accept patches goes up. I imagine it looks like an exponential drop off.
- esafak 9mo ago
  Absolutely. I look at the commit and PR history. Are the maintainers responsive and welcoming?
- IshKebab 9mo ago
  Have you found this actually works? I wouldn't be surprised if many projects happily accept trivial PRs (because they're easy to deal with) but then ignore or naysay anything more substantial.
  - Brian_K_White 9mo ago
    The point is only 50% to see if they respond, it's also to start establishing yourself as a known entity to them. They will ignore a big patch from a rando and obviously process a big patch from themselves. You can become somehwere in between and no longer be a rando, but have to start from the rando end.
- mort96 9mo ago
  This is probably the best approach. I submitted a patch to Go once, and never got anything resembling a response. Told me that Go is more or less completely inaccessible; I should treat it as a Google product rather than a FOSS project I can contribute to. The Go standard library documentation bug I submitted a fix to still exists to this day.

179 points by csmantle 9mo ago

I have this theory that with LLMs getting better at writing code our current open source model (relatively few large projects that everyone contributes to, relatively rare to maintain your own fork) will invert and it will be easier and more common for people to have personalized forks and a lot of the problems around managing large open source projects will just become irrelevant

majormajor 9mo ago
Or a ton of "personalized agents" will start bugging upstream to complain about suspected issues with all those forks all the time...
mort96 9mo ago
Why would you want to manage your own fork of everything?
- voakbasda 9mo ago
  Because that cost can be less than dealing with upstream.

beart 9mo ago

I know Java has a complicated history of ownership, but I'm not sure I understand why Oracle is able to block contributions to OpenJDK. I thought the point of OpenJDK was to be separate from Oracle. I'm not a Java developer, just curious how this works.

oliwarner 9mo ago
It's still their project and the Oracle Contributor Agreement means they get to asset joint ownership of your contributions. That's broadly the point of CLAs, but for a beefy project like OpenJDK with so much shared code baked deep into enterprise deployment, Oracle will feel it's critical they can pull freely given code into the depths of their closed Java builds. It's their project. It does absolutely block contributions (employers are unhappy sacrificing their engineering output to Oracle). If you don't like it, fork it.
- mort96 9mo ago
  So TL;DR I'm right to be skeptical of everything Java because even OpenJDK is pretty much owned and controlled by Oracle? Good to know. I'll keep avoiding it like the plague then, with slightly more confidence:
  - mindcrime 9mo ago
    Not really. OpenJDK is exactly what OpenJDK is, and there are plenty of builds provided by other vendors who have nothing to do with Oracle. All Oracle "owning" it really means is that they basically have unilateral ability to make changes to Java[1], where said changes will be reflected in their official binary releases. And they charge for their releases (and have some auditing / licensing terms which many find off-putting) which is only important if it's really important for you to use an Official Oracle Build for some reason, as opposed to Eclipse Temurin, Amazon Corretto, BellSoft Liberica, Red Hat's build, etc. Personally I just use the OpenJDK builds provided by my linux distro and never give it a second thought. [1]: And so far, Oracle haven't shown much, if any, propensity for abusing their control of Java. There's a process and they seem to mostly stick to it.
    - mort96 9mo ago
      Dude, Oracle controls who can contribute. I don't understand how you can say it has nothing to do with Oracle.
      - oliwarner 9mo ago
        Well, kind of. Oracle might only accept upstream contributions but OpenJDK is GPL2, so anyone can host their fork of OpenJDK with whatever GPL2-licensed patches they like, regardless of the OCA/CLA being signed. Indeed there are enough distributions of OpenJDK that there's a site for picking which is best for you. I can't really speak to how current that information is, or how good it is, but it exists: https://whichjdk.com/ https://whichjdk.com/ But yes, you might be right to be suspect of Java as a whole if this is how they treat contributors. It's worth noting that many larger open source projects have contributor agreements to strengthen their rights for redistribution that a standard license might not cover. What if they want to change the license? They don't want to be hamstrung by a million contributions. Moral rights are something you often see. And severability might also be a concern. Some like the OCA are worse than others. The Python one is pretty good because it limits any future relicensing to open source. https://www.python.org/psf/contrib/contrib-form/ https://www.python.org/psf/contrib/contrib-form/
gf000 9mo ago
Where does oracle block contributions? This was more of an unfortunate lack of attention/prioritization. Don't assume malice where a simpler explanation exists.
- deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
- beart 9mo ago
  I assumed nothing.
grishka 9mo ago
OpenJDK is the "default" implementation of Java and it's maintained by Oracle. Beyond that, there exists at least OpenJ9, which is a completely independent implementation, maintained by Eclipse Foundation.
- lmz 9mo ago
  Isn't OpenJ9 "just" the VM and not the class library? Also it's IBM-backed so it's more a case of pick your poison there.
themafia 9mo ago
Corporations love open source when it delivers working code to their doorstep. They hate open source when it comes to actually maintaining and managing a community of developers who really do care about and use the core product. So they create draconian "agreements" and "codes" to tilt the playing field entirely in their favor. It's entirely antithetical to the whole idea of open source. These projects should be ruthlessly forked and all corporate development efforts ignored.
- bruce511 9mo ago
  I'll be honest, I'm not sure why you're aggrieved here. There's absolutely nothing in the "idea of Open Source" that suggests upstream has to accept contributions. Open Source allows you to tinker with the code, not force your changes on others. Equally you are welcome to not sign anything you font want to sign. There are reasons for those docs, there are reasons to not sign them. It's completely your choice. And of course you are free to fork anything anytime you like. You're even free to encourage others. So no beef there. I presume you have at least followed your in principles here? I'm guessing you have forked Linux, and your browser, and your favorite language? And office suite? Posting links here would likely attract others who object to corporate development joining you.
  - themafia 9mo ago
    > that suggests upstream has to accept contributions Which is why I said they should be forked. There's nothing that suggests "upstream" has any actual significance. > I presume you have at least followed your in principles here? Yes. Thanks for asking. I appreciate questions in good faith. > I'm guessing you have forked Linux, and your browser, and your favorite language? Hmm.. do I have to sign an agreement to contribute to those? I'm not sure I have. Is this actually comparable? > Posting links here would likely attract others who object to corporate development joining you. That's sweet of you.
- re-thc 9mo ago
  > These projects should be ruthlessly forked and all corporate development efforts ignored. Please do and show that it can be sustainable. It’s easy to complain at home. It’s hard to actually keep it going.
M95D 9mo ago
This is very common in all open source projects, not just Java/Oracle.
- mort96 9mo ago
  It's not common for a random company to gatekeep contributions to a community project, and OpenJDK brands itself as a community project that's more or less independent from Oracle.

__turbobrew__ 9mo ago

I have been trying to upstream patches to kubernetes and etcd for about a year and ended up giving up. It is impossible to get someone from the project to review my PRs, and since I cannot get PRs under my belt I can not become a maintainer either. My suspicion is that you get ghosted if you don’t have a @google or @redhat email address and really the only way to become a contributor is to be buddies with someone who works on the project already. I have considered going to one of the CNCF committee meetings and being like, hey you guys are not accepting new contributions which goes against your mandate. But in the end I just maintain local patches that don’t get upstreamed which is easier.

direwolf20 9mo ago
The CNCF may or may not take it seriously. They definitely won't if they don't know.
ahmedtd 9mo ago
Can you link your PRs here? Kubernetes is such a huge project that there are few reviewers who would feel comfortable signing off an an arbitrary PR in a part of the codebase they are not very familiar with. It's more like Linux, where you need to find the working group (Kubernetes SIG) who would be a good sponsor for a patch, and they can then assign a good reviewer. (This is true even if you work for Google or Red Hat)
- __turbobrew__ 9mo ago
  My PRs are submitted under my real name and my HN account is not under my real name, so I cannot share. For my etcd changes I did submit to the correct SIG, but nobody reviewed it.
perfmode 9mo ago
maybe you’ve already done this and I’m sorry if i’m telling you the obvious. You could analyze the repo to identify others who have modified the same files. and reach out to them specifically.

Freak_NL 9mo ago

[flagged]

arglebarnacle 9mo ago
Interesting, when I've come across this before I have always interpreted it as "not from Hong Kong", especially in a context like this where it's raised in the context of engaging with a western counterpart's potential suspicion. It's been my experience that westerners (I am a westerner) do have different assumptions about "mainland" Chinese people than people from Hong Kong who are assumed to be more cosmopolitan, "westernized", or even "politically neutral" from a western liberal capitalist perspective, so it seems reasonable to point it out in this context.
ok123456 9mo ago
[flagged]
- nine_k 9mo ago
  AFAICT both the Beijing's narrative and the Taipei narrative assume that "mainland China" and Taiwan should ideally be the same state, but the completely diverge in their notion of what state that should be: PRC or ROC.
amluto 9mo ago
> The phrase "Chinese Mainland" when used in English comes loaded with the suggestion that Taiwan is rightfully part of China For better or for worse, many people on both sides of the strait have used language along these lines that suggests that Taiwan is part of China for decades and probably even since a bit before 1949 (I was not alive at the time). I think that, at this point, the term “mainland China” is just the default. That being said, a person from China could just say they’re from China and no one would be confused. This is in contrast to someone saying they’re Chinese, which can be ambiguous.
verall 9mo ago
> The phrase "Chinese Mainland" when used in English comes loaded with the suggestion that Taiwan is rightfully part of China — it is an unavoidable implication. I'm really curious - what people did you get this idea from? I've never heard this before. I have heard "mainland China" to mean, specifically, "China, not Hong Kong or Macau", from: - Taiwanese people - Hong Kong people - Mainland Chinese people - Taiwanese-americans - Chinese-americans (immigrated from the mainland) It's just mainland China (大陆）. I have never met Chinese or Taiwanese people who feel this is a politically loaded term.

gavinray 9mo ago

I signed the OCA in 2021 as part of some contributions to GraalVM. The process was much more involved than anything I'd previously signed, and it was slow, but in my case eventually got approved. It mostly involved some emails with an actual human and PDF's to be docu-signed.

nubinetwork 9mo ago

Despite their OSS contributions, and the fact that they have their own Linux distro, oracle is one of the worst companies to deal with in terms of OSS. Very NIH syndrome, very gatekeep-y. I refuse to use grub because I know I'll never get bugs fixed since oracle claims ownership of the repo there as well.

koutakun 9mo ago
>I refuse to use grub because I know I'll never get bugs fixed since oracle claims ownership of the repo there as well. Wait what? Source on this? GRUB is supposed to be a GNU Project, I would've thought they'd rather die than accept any sort of Oracle ownership of it.
- fao_ 9mo ago
  GNU GRUB is a GNU project, yes. No idea what OP is talking about https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/ https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/
  - Phelinofist 9mo ago
    The maintainer section lists 2/3 maintainers being from Oracle -I guess thats what OP means

throwaway290 9mo ago

why do they waste all that ai writing new patches instead of helping them upstream existing patches?

andrewmcwatters 9mo ago

There is an inverse relationship with respect to the size of an organization or project and its authors or maintainers willingness to review and merge pull requests. The smaller a project, the more willing an author is to write the entire feature for you based on a plain request. Go help smaller projects, the big ones don't care that you've submitted any work at all.

xyst 9mo ago

I am not surprised. Oracle acquiring Sun Microsystems has been the death kneel of open source Java ecosystem. Never forget: One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison still runs this company.

_benj 9mo ago

Would there be a difference in contributing to OpenJDK vs to, say, Temurin or Zulu Java? How separated are those Java JDKs really from OpenJDK?

embedding-shape 9mo ago
Temurin and others are "distributions" of OpenJDK, basically their compilation results of it, not their own codebase. They're not "forks" in terms of source code, but they have patches, build systems, QA, and everything else around it that they apply, then offer you their version of it. OpenJDK: where Java is developed Temurin / Zulu: where OpenJDK is built, tested, packaged, and supported
- _benj 9mo ago
  Thanks for the explanation!

Phelinofist 9mo ago

In a response Dalibor Topic claims that he rejected some of his submission have been rejected. So one of them is lying?

markus_zhang 9mo ago

Judging from the whole thread, might just be some misunderstanding of the workflow?

delusional 9mo ago

Any asipiring commentor should note that dalibor has responded, and it doesn't sound like he's unreasonable https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/hotspot-dev/2026-January/118083.html https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/hotspot-dev/2026-January/...

simpaticoder 9mo ago
And the OP responded too, apologizing for causing confusion https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/hotspot-dev/2026-January/118084.html https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/hotspot-dev/2026-January/...

bruce511 9mo ago

I confess, I'm an old guy, who was around when Open Source was still young. Being able to read the code, learn to be z better programmer, tweak it to my needs, control what was running on my machine. Reading other comments on this thread it seems like the mood has shifted. Now there seems to be an expectation that Open Source means "you should promptly review and accept my changes". There is much wailing that corporates (who, by the way, never used to release code at all) are somehow at fault for either existing, or not responding quick enough or requiring paperwork(!). I'm not sure when pushing code upstream to Open Source became an entitlement. I'm pretty sure it wasn't there at the beginning and it's nor part if any license I'm aware of.

quesomaster9000 9mo ago
I'm very much from the same era, "stfu and fork it", "PoC or GTFO". And as I got older, I realized "I am not the customer, there is no money in responding to me, I am a net negative cost to your business". And uhh... I'll shuffle the F out now then? And try and catch-up on 200 years of math. I don't think anything has changed IRL, aside from my knees hurting
- burnt-resistor 9mo ago
  "Self-service doacracy" rather than "look at me and fix my 'world-ending' problem for me for free right now". While I applaud creating patches and submitting them upstream, there's zero obligation to review or accept them... just throw them out there and let whatever happens happen in its own time. It's my tailbone and an old torn back injury; I can't sit or stand for longer than 2 hours and I think I need to swap my Aeron classic size B for a C.
burnt-resistor 9mo ago
Most of Meta's groups' approach to FOSS is throwing piles of sticks over a wall. They don't even check code can build, that it doesn't have some internal-only dependencies, and don't even care if they break other groups' code. The timeline for very minor bug can also be on the order of months to years because everyone working at the business is focused on shipping "impact" to keep their job when the next performance review/layoff round comes along.

_rwo 9mo ago

Oh yeah, Oracle; if you want to see where contributions come die see mysql-operator - ton of stuff broken, pull request fixes (like most obvious, no-brain bugfixes) slurped into bugs.mysql.com oblivion never seeing the light of day

dwroberts 9mo ago

The PRs they link mostly seem like noise? “Remove the d prefix from this number because the C++ standard doesn’t require it”. Yeah great.

deleted 9mo ago
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jstanley 9mo ago
That's a pretty unfair characterisation of the commit in question: https://github.com/loongson/jdk/pull/125/commits/ee300a6ce7348f77c2642f3a6b5b0c46d6117862 https://github.com/loongson/jdk/pull/125/commits/ee300a6ce73... By my reading, it's not merely that the standard doesn't require the "d" suffix, it's that the standard doesn't allow the "d" suffix, and the code won't compile on anything but gcc.
- freedomben 9mo ago
  Agreed, although things I immediately think of are: 1. Is "anything but gcc" actually supported by the project? Do they have a goal of supporting other compilers or possibly an explicit decision not to support other compilers? 2. If they do support other compilers, how did the "d" suffix make it in the first place? That's something I would expect the dev or CI to catch pretty quickly. 3. Does gcc behave any differently with the "d" suffix not there? (I would think a core dev would know that off the top of their head, so it's possible they looked at it and decided it wasn't worth it. One would hope they'd comment on the PR though if they did that). If it does, this could introduce a really hard-to-track-down bug. I'm not defending Oracle here (in fact I hate Oracle and think they are a scourge on humanity) but trying to approach this with an objective look.
  - mort96 9mo ago
    Is the project clearly documented as being written in GNU C++ rather than standard C++? If not, anything that's accidentally invalid C++ is fair game for bug fixes, is it not?
  - 9mo ago

freedomben 9mo ago

All of the https://github.com/AOSC-Tracking/jdk/ https://github.com/AOSC-Tracking/jdk/ links 404 for me, so it's difficult to get a sense of what was being done. Going off of the "loongson fork" links though they look rather trivial. Not saying they should be ignored, but I do think trivial PRs to large critical open source projects like JDK can often end up taking more time away from contributing engineers doing reviews and testing than they are worth. I know first-hand the frustration of having PRs ignored and it can be quite demoralizing, so I do feel for the author. It sounds like the author is getting to a place of peace with it, and my advice from having been down that path before is to do exactly that, and find something else interesting to hack on.

Cpoll 9mo ago
But that's not what's happening here, right? They're blocked on having their 'Oracle Contributer Agreement' approved; they're not even at the stage where their PRs are eligible for being ignored.
- what 9mo ago
  The email thread suggests his PRs were reviewed promptly and rejected. Nothing was ignored. https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/hotspot-dev/2026-January/118083.html https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/hotspot-dev/2026-January/...
  - evgpbfhnr 9mo ago
    iiuc, this mail isn't about his PRs being rejected, it's the OCA submission e.g. the CLA obtention form. (So his ping "any progress?" apparently fell on the wrong ears, if he wasn't told he had to submit a new application with something corrected...)
deleted 9mo ago
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aeurielesn 9mo ago
I disagree. Trivial PRs are perfect for first contributions, especially to get through the myriad of bots requesting you to sign/review stuff. Having said that, I would never contribute to a project with a first contributor experience like this one.

rendaw 9mo ago

Regardless of the contents, > For each of my emails, I got a reply, saying that they "sincerely apologize" and "@Dalibor Topic Can you please review...", with no actual progress being made. then > Sorry to hear this. .... @Dalibor Topic <dalibor.topic at oracle.com>, can we get this prioritized? This is pretty morbidly funny.

softwaredoug 9mo ago
Anyone who has been a freelancer negotiating a contract with a big company feels this sort of thing in their bones.
- krater23 9mo ago
  Never had this issue. Its just as simple as start to work without contract and the promise of department head to get a contract and after two weeks mention to the contracting that you work since two weeks and have still not signed a NDA. Next sentence is: I don't fear to not get my money, but currently I don't know if you pay or someone else...
  - NooneAtAll3 9mo ago
    compiler error: `since(time_point_t)` cannot be called with `time_duration_t` were you trying to use `for(time_duration_t)` ?

voakbasda 9mo ago

When I want to contribute to an open source project, I throw together some trivial but useful patches and see how the project responds. Many projects behave this way, particularly those with corporate overlords. At best, it will take weeks to get a simple patch reviewed. By then, I have moved on, at least with my intention to send anything upstream. I commend the author for giving them a whole year, but I have found that is best a recipe for disappointment. Maintainers: how you react to patches and PRs significantly influence whether or not you get skilled contributors. When I was maintaining such projects, I always tried to reply within 24 hours to new contributors. It would be interesting to see how quickly the retention rate drops off as the time to review/accept patches goes up. I imagine it looks like an exponential drop off.

esafak 9mo ago
Absolutely. I look at the commit and PR history. Are the maintainers responsive and welcoming?
IshKebab 9mo ago
Have you found this actually works? I wouldn't be surprised if many projects happily accept trivial PRs (because they're easy to deal with) but then ignore or naysay anything more substantial.
- Brian_K_White 9mo ago
  The point is only 50% to see if they respond, it's also to start establishing yourself as a known entity to them. They will ignore a big patch from a rando and obviously process a big patch from themselves. You can become somehwere in between and no longer be a rando, but have to start from the rando end.
mort96 9mo ago
This is probably the best approach. I submitted a patch to Go once, and never got anything resembling a response. Told me that Go is more or less completely inaccessible; I should treat it as a Google product rather than a FOSS project I can contribute to. The Go standard library documentation bug I submitted a fix to still exists to this day.