Martin Roth wrote: > I'd like to discuss the issue of what's expected from developers after > code is added to the coreboot tree.
Thanks for bringing this up. > It seems like there's a feeling > that if a company pushes code to coreboot, or hires someone to push > code to coreboot that there's an obligation to help maintain that code > going forward. This seems to be different than if an individual adds > code, but maybe I'm wrong. That's about right, at least for me. I assume that no company contributes to coreboot purely out of altruism, in fact I believe that doing so could violate tax code in some jursidictions. Given that companies engage in coreboot development with a resource (money) profit motive I find it fair and just to expect that some of that profit will be contributed back into the project, through "public good" contributions, which can include janitorial maintenance work as well as much-requested feature development that noone else is working on. Nobody wants to receive a code dump. Volunteer contributors tend to not have resources comparable to companies. And volunteers inherently tend to focus on "public good" contributions. I believe that everyone who sees the project activity maintains a mental balance sheet of who has taken how much and who has given how much. At least I do this. I think it's human nature. My expectations derive from that (unspoken, subjective) balance sheet. My experience is, however, another axis. In my experience, some companies give more "public good" back than they take, other companies only ever take and never give anything at all back, and other companies still will take, and try to give back, but fail to give back anything useful out of ignorance in the best case, and give back something harmful on purpose in the worst. The maintenance story in coreboot has been a topic before, and everyone (also every individual developer working for companies) knows that a maintenance investment is required for the code not to become perverted over time. But someone has to spend money on that, and noone really wants to. The Linux Foundation employs maintainers for this purpose. It might be useful for coreboot to also employ maintainers, but I'd vehemently argue *against* copying or joining the Linux Foundation, because it continually make things worse rather than better. One of the fundamental problems is the expectations its members have, another is the (legal) culture in its jurisdiction. //Peter _______________________________________________ coreboot mailing list -- coreboot@coreboot.org To unsubscribe send an email to coreboot-le...@coreboot.org
