Lack of open source shown as negative part of D on Dr. Dobbs

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, May 09, 2012 23:00:16 Joseph Rushton Wakeling wrote:
> On 09/05/12 21:43, deadalnix wrote:
> > Le 09/05/2012 21:19, Nick Sabalausky a écrit :
> >> "deadalnix"<deadalnix at gmail.com> wrote in message
> >> news:jodll6$14eu$1 at digitalmars.com...
> >> 
> >>> I'd that the most important part of FOSS isn't the license but the
> >>> process. And we are not here yet.
> >> 
> >> How so?
> > 
> > We have a botleneck in accepting contributions.
> 
> To an extent that seems to parallel most projects with a small team of core
> developers -- if you don't have enough people with the right combination of
> expertise, understanding and time commitment, it's difficult to effectively
> cope with the volume of bug reports, feature requests and potential new
> contributors.
> 
> That said, I don't think you can entirely divorce contribution issues from
> the licence. One of the things that allows FOSS projects to scale
> effectively is that they have multiple distribution channels and (often)
> multiple partially independent development teams. E.g. if you take the
> Linux kernel, you have many different distros, many of which have internal
> kernel dev teams; you have multiple different ways to get a working copy of
> the kernel (the kernel.org website, your distro of choice, your Android
> mobile phone, your web host, your embedded device ...), all of which create
> corresponding points of entry for contribution.
> 
> That spread of 3rd-party distribution and modification _does_ rely on the
> licence, as those suppliers need to be able to freely work on the code
> without needing to go through a single upstream point of contribution, and
> they need to have certainty that the permission to do so is not conditional
> or potentially able to be rescinded.

The only thing that isn't fully open source is the dmd backend, and dmd gets 
more pull requests than druntime and Phobos combined (it's also the project 
with the biggest bottleneck, because _everything_ goes through Walter rather 
than a small group of developers). So, I don't think that the license is 
negatively impacting us at all as far as contributions go. It was having the 
source in svn rather than in git up on github which was the real problem. 
We've gotten _way_ more contributions (especially to dmd) ever since we put it 
all up on github.

- Jonathan M Davis