Re:The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders
by ebiester on Friday November 20, 2020 @09:19AM
(#25160616)
That doesn't solve the problem completely, though, as truly fixing it requires review time with the existing team. It's still unpaid labor, but now it involves code review and collaboration.
I think we still need people paying open source contributors.
Re:The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders
by zamalek on Friday November 20, 2020 @11:27AM
(#25161939)
Agreed. It does bring the egos to the altruistic water, other arguments become much easier once they have experience with the value of OSS participation.
Furthermore, if a company has a culture of fixing things in open source, people are exposed to it. I can guarantee that many great potential personal time contributors have never been shown the door.
Re:The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders
by wdb on Friday November 20, 2020 @09:43AM
(#25160850)
One of the reasons why I haven't raised a PR yet to Cypress to add my WebKit support to the project.
Cypress not responding to emails to orchestrate the PR isn't helping either
Re:The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders
by ianlevesque on Friday November 20, 2020 @12:06AM
(#25157466)
I agree this is a great way to sell it, but don’t all the dead end forks of Linux for various ARM SoCs belie the Linux argument?
Re:The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders
by dvdkon on Friday November 20, 2020 @03:33AM
(#25158457)
They perfectly demonstrate the disadvantages of private forks. They don't get security fixes, other bugfixes, or new features that userspace software will eventually use.
Re:The Few, the Tired, the Open Source Coders
by rozab on Friday November 20, 2020 @05:42AM
(#25159169)
Right, they never would have seen the light of day were it not for GPL.
> The fastest way to get results is for me to contribute a fix.
> Can't we copy their code and fix it locally?
> Absolutely, but then we won't get any fixes from them in the future, unless we set up our own build infrastructure and have a team make sure that they merge across changes regularly.
... which starts sounding like lots of money. Your employer cares about the bottom line, so make it about the bottom line. The Linux Kernel is a fantastic example of egoistic altruism in action. You don't need to hire people to fix arbitrary things in OSS (although that would be appreciated), just fix the things you care about.
Finally, getting a PR merged into a big project makes any other method of training look grossly incompetent - and it's free. Go ahead and cancel that company-wide Pluralsight or Linked-in Learning contract, now we're saving money.
Don't ask for open source developers, ask to fix things in open source.