Re:Open-source, not open-contribution
by AmericanChopper on Thursday January 28, 2021 @04:30PM
(#25949554)
I contract for a lot of large enterprise, and I’ve written a lot of patches for open source projects in that capacity (to fix issues my large enterprise customers were having). My default position for this has always been that I’m going to get the benefit of fixing the problem regardless of whether my changes are merged. If the project maintainer chooses to merge my changes, then that’s even better, because that’s a tacit commitment from the project maintainer to maintain my changes into the future.
> a tacit commitment from the project maintainer to maintain my changes into the future
Sometimes. Depends on the norms of the project. Depends on the scope of the changes.
Re:Open-source, not open-contribution
by AmericanChopper on Thursday January 28, 2021 @05:55PM
(#25950711)
Of course. A lot of the time there’s not even a commitment that the project isn’t going to be entirely abandoned at some point in the future. But if you make your improvements available for other people to benefit from, you’re greatly increasing the chances that other people are also going to help maintain them (or maybe just devote some effort to avoid breaking them).
Why? You've taken the time to fix a problem you are having in code that you are using. You've made that patch available to the upstream maintainer, but if they don't accept it that doesn't stop you (or anyone else) from doing what you want to do with the code. I don't see how you're any worse off.