"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.