Comment by varispeed
1 year ago
Have you got paid for this?
The reason I am asking is that I see volunteering time for extremely wealthy big corporations as foolish.
At very least developers should get together and lobby that if big corporations use open source software, they should be paying royalties to contributors.
That said, if you look at volunteering time, it is much better to do it for charities that often struggle getting competent IT people, but of course it is not as glamourous.
Consider this, the thing they fixed is something they depend on for their daily programming needs relatively often. By fixing it themselves instead of waiting for who knows how long, they are saving a lot of future time and frustration. They don't to work around the issue anymore and can simply focus on what they want.
Which is also worth something.
But that will make these companies lazy.
Chromium is open source, in my opinion, because Google can brag about open source, it has all the right buzzwords. But also gives them free R&D and labour.
I think given the size and wealth of Google, this is entirely inappropriate and people shouldn't be contributing to it, because it will only encourage this parasitic and exploitative behaviour.
>I think given the size and wealth of Google, this is entirely inappropriate and people shouldn't be contributing to it, because it will only encourage this parasitic and exploitative behaviour.
So you would rather have chromium be closed source, or for people to fix the bug but hoard the patches? Do you hate the idea of google benefiting from your work so much that you're willing screw over yourself (in the form of having to maintain the bugfixes yourself) and others (because they don't get the bugfixes) in the process? Are you also against contributing improvements to other OSS projects (eg. linux kernel) because corporations might benefit from it and "gives them free R&D and labour"?
The majority of work on Chromium is done by engineers on Google's payroll.
There certainly are OSS projects out there where the majority of work is done by volunteers and where companies profit from their labor. This isn't really one of them, at least not in the way you are describing it.
Applying one "truth" to the entire world generally means that you're simplifying things to such a degree that they become meaningless or even ridiculous parodies of themselves.
I feel like that this might be what you are doing here.
There is a entire ecosystem because of Chromium.
I'd argue it's one of the least "parasitic" corporate OSS project.
This is fair, and is my general philosophy. But if you're running into the bug first hand and its costing you otherwise, it may be the most pragmatic thing to just fix the bug yourself and contribute it back.
One of my Google interviewers leaned back in his Eames lounge chair and stated that he got his start there by contributing optimizations to Chromium. I think it worked out well for him.
sadly bounties only barely work in a security setting and I've never seen it work for other things. Too much noise vs value.
You're such a good man, you don't need to use such hash language.