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1. Bradley M. Kuhn Free Software & Culture Group , Desktop Summit , Dave Neary

   !ds2011: @nearyd: "The Cost of Going It Alone": if you take from !FaiF Software projects but don't shepherd the changes upstream.

   Saturday, 06-Aug-11 12:03:14 UTC from web
   • Bradley M. Kuhn Desktop Summit , Dave Neary

     @nearyd: asks crowd "who knows about Softway". I was the only person in the !ds2011 room to raise my hand about it. He's using it as example

     Saturday, 06-Aug-11 12:03:42 UTC
   • Bradley M. Kuhn Desktop Summit , Dave Neary

     !ds2011: @nearyd: Softway 6-8 person months work on #GCC. Went to #Cygnus to get stuff upstream. Cygnus quoted $120k w/ 14 months lead time.

     Saturday, 06-Aug-11 12:05:31 UTC
   • Bradley M. Kuhn Desktop Summit , Dave Neary

     !ds2011: @nearyd: Ada Core quoted Softway $40k to upstream their #GCC changes, which was roughly same cost Softway already invested.

     Saturday, 06-Aug-11 12:06:47 UTC
   • Bradley M. Kuhn Desktop Summit , Dave Neary

     !ds2011: @nearyd: Community ends up doing a lot of patch rewriting. Companies temp-fork from stable, not from development version.

     Saturday, 06-Aug-11 12:09:53 UTC
   • Bradley M. Kuhn Desktop Summit , Dave Neary

     !ds2011: @nearyd: Most companies ignore upstream b/c they've forked from stable release. The other choice is to port the changes to unstable

     Saturday, 06-Aug-11 12:11:46 UTC
   • Bradley M. Kuhn Linux , Oracle , Desktop Summit , Dave Neary

     !ds2011: @nearyd compares #btrfs upstreaming in !Linux by !Oracle vs. other filesystems that have disappeared for failure to upstream.

     Saturday, 06-Aug-11 12:13:53 UTC
   • Bradley M. Kuhn Desktop Summit , Dave Neary

     !ds2011: @nearyd: #Nokia gives #Igalia $50k contract to make Hildon work on GTK+ b/c it had not been previously upstreamed.

     Saturday, 06-Aug-11 12:14:36 UTC
   • Bradley M. Kuhn Linux , Desktop Summit , Dave Neary

     !ds2011: @nearyd: #wakelock !Linux upstream by #Hjønnevåg. Complete explosion: 1500 email thread. Suspend blockers were merged,not wakelocks

     Saturday, 06-Aug-11 12:16:30 UTC
   • Bradley M. Kuhn Desktop Summit , Dave Neary , Chris DiBona

     !ds2011 @nearyd constasts statement by @cdibona & #tytso. Points out #Garrett quote re: using someone w/ name-recognition to shepherd change

     Saturday, 06-Aug-11 12:17:50 UTC
   • Bradley M. Kuhn Desktop Summit , Dave Neary

     !ds2011: @nearyd: difficult to "build castle on quicksand" + chance of patch rejection leads companies to fork off vendor branch from stable

     Saturday, 06-Aug-11 12:19:31 UTC
   • Bradley M. Kuhn Linux , IBM Group , Dave Neary

     I'm again one of only a few people in audience who have heard of @nearyd's next example: !IBM's EVMS work in !Linux.

     Saturday, 06-Aug-11 12:20:16 UTC
   • Bradley M. Kuhn Linux , IBM Group , Desktop Summit , Dave Neary

     !ds2011: @nearyd: #Corry of !IBM proposes #EVMS to !Linux for merging. Linus merges #Sistina's LVM2, ignores EVMS proposal entirely.

     Saturday, 06-Aug-11 12:21:14 UTC
   • Bradley M. Kuhn Linux , IBM Group , Desktop Summit , Dave Neary

     !ds2011: @nearyd: #Corry of !IBM abandons #EVMS kernel space & ports userspace to #LVM2 !Linux APIs instead. Cost estimate: 18 person-months

     Saturday, 06-Aug-11 12:22:21 UTC
   • Bradley M. Kuhn Desktop Summit , Dave Neary

     !ds2011: @nearyd poses question:"When is it worth a company's while to engage upstream?" Answer for short term projects: It's never worth it

     Saturday, 06-Aug-11 12:23:21 UTC
   • Bradley M. Kuhn Desktop Summit , Dave Neary

     !ds2011: @nearyd: Long-term projects w/ small/medium delta should really think about upstream shepherding. Must hire/create experienced dev!

     Saturday, 06-Aug-11 12:24:23 UTC
   • Bradley M. Kuhn Desktop Summit , Dave Neary

     !ds2011: @nearyd: Strategic long term projects absolutely must engage w/ upstream,which means 20% time for some devs to work on other stuff.

     Saturday, 06-Aug-11 12:26:12 UTC
   • Bradley M. Kuhn Desktop Summit , Dave Neary

     !ds2011: @nearyd: If you care about upstream as part of your strategic plans, you absolutely need a known upstream developer on your staff.

     Saturday, 06-Aug-11 12:27:02 UTC
   • Dave Neary

     @bkuhn Actually I said "you need a maintainer", and Thiago of Qt has estimated that maintainers spend 20-30% of their time on maintainance.

     Saturday, 06-Aug-11 17:05:39 UTC
   • Dave Neary

     @bkuhn Elaboration: Small patch or short-term project - cost of working upstream outweighs benefit to patcher (and that's a tragedy).

     Saturday, 06-Aug-11 17:06:40 UTC
   • Dave Neary

     @bkuhn You may get "fire & forget" drive-by patches, but you'll never get someone to update it if you want changes.

     Saturday, 06-Aug-11 17:07:59 UTC