Maintaining your own fork means you are taking de-facto responsibility for the maintenance of more projects in addition to your paying projects.

The costs of keeping them current adds up surprisingly quickly.

In fact, it adds up so quickly that my company has a standing policy in place that we will do _whatever_it_takes_ to have any pull requests we need in an upstream project integrated in order to avoid us having to maintain a fork.

What this means in practice usually is that getting the pull request accepted becomes the primary focus for one of the senior engineers for the 1-2 weeks it takes to get it into a shape that the project maintainer can work with.

As you can imagine this is also expensive, but it's a fraction of the cost of maintaining our own fork of the project.

So - here's my offer to Libré, Free and Open Source Software maintainers everywhere:

I will _gladly_ pay the cost of 1 week of a senior engineer's salary to have you accept my pull request if you are prepared to either:

1) do the quality control work yourself or…

2) hold the hand of one of my junior engineers while they learn how to do it.

> I will _gladly_ pay the cost of 1 week of a senior engineer's salary to have you accept my pull request if you are prepared to either: > 1) do the quality control work yourself

I too would gladly pay one dollar for a hundred dollars bill.

When you consider the cost of having to re-merge all your work on every update, I'd be more than happy to pay some reasonable sum to have it merged into master and maintained there. Could save me a lot of work.