"Joseph Rushton Wakeling via Digitalmars-d" wrote in message news:mailman.4177.1420498284.9932.digitalmar...@puremagic.com...

> A company is not going to just write a bunch of patches and open source > all of > them unless they have some complementary business model to go with it, > whether > google making more mobile revenue off Android or Apple providing clang > as the
> system compiler on OS X and making money off the bundled Mac.

However, I don't see it making any sense for a company to invest in proprietary patches to a toolchain, because 99% of the time, when you need a patch written, it's a bugfix. And when you want a bugfix, you don't want a patch that applies only to your version of the toolchain and which you (or your friendly proprietary-patch-writing consultant) have to keep rebasing on top of upstream for the next 6 months -- you want upstream fixed. Otherwise you'll wind up paying far more merely for maintenance of your proprietary extensions, than you would have just to get someone to write a patch and get it straight into the open-source upstream.

This is very important - upstreaming your patches means that the community will maintain them for you. This is why it's useful for a company to develop their own patches and still contribute back upstream.

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