Re: Patch committers

Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> writes:

> Peter Eisentraut wrote:
>> discernible benefits. But you can't expect a lot of people or employers
>> to reserve time on top of that for handholding other people's patches
>> and for other "community" stuff that has no easy to measure benefits.
>
> Totally agree. It is that zero-return work that is hard to justify for
> people and companies. It is clearly something that requires
> self-sacrifice, and personally I think a culture of self-sacrifice is
> what has given us such great success and such a nuturing community
> environment.

I don't know what you're talking about here, or refering to.

The easy way to explain Open Source contributing to PHB and finance
people, in my mind, is the following: Open Source is not free as in free
beer. At all. Rather than paying licences costs, what you have to pay
for is your employees salary when they take the time to participate into
this community things. And if you're using Open Source Software, you
*need* employees that take part of the community processes.

That also mean you have real experts now, and ones able to drive the
project in a direction that will be to your profit as an employer. For
example, this hairy bug in your production environment will get fixed
the day you report about it, rather that when the licencing company
think it matches their roadmap, if ever.

Oh and some other niceties about it. Let's try the "story telling"
style... When I worked on preprepare, I though we had an urgent need
here to run it. It happened that we had yet more urgent to do, so I
barely had time to have it working and commit it on some pgfoundry
CVS. Less than a week after, I'm told on IRC that the product is running
fine in a production environment somewhere, taking real load. Now I
don't have to make tests before deploying. That has been done for
me. That's Open Source.

Regards,
--
dim

Is it 2009 and we're still having this discussion about how
participating into Open Source communities is a good way to spend your
money as an employer? Wow.