Comment by bigfishrunning
8 hours ago
Sure, or you can have the developer you hired submit your patches upstream so others can benefit from them too. Or you can wait around for someone else to do it. But to demand support for free from volunteers isn't it; don't expect something for nothing.
You mean I should pay for software and not depend on open surge software?
But as far as just getting it merged upstream is not that simple depending on who the maintainers are or the nature of the change.
I actually have an anecdote. I use to work at AWS Professional Services and I was on a a rag tag team maintaining and adding features to am open source project that started off as a code sample in blog post. But got more and more popular over time in its niche and added features.
It was so popular that when I left AWS, that the interviewer asked me what project I was most proud of and when I mentioned it, the questions basically stopped and they made me an offer two days later.
AWS has a lot open source initiatives and GitHub organizations. The easiest organization to release products in with the lowest overhead is AWS Samples.
https://github.com/aws-samples
The process to get approved is dead simple and once I knew the process, I was able to turn around getting my own code that was sanitized from customer projects in there in less than two days. I had eight of my own projects in there that I legally, ethically and with approval allowed me to take some of my code with me that I used across two other companies.
But back to the main point. This other project where I had commit rights, I could easily fork it, make modifications for a customer, submit my pull request after testing it and get it merged in within less than a month, as could a former coworker who was retired and made and submitted changes for some non profits who he was working with for free.
Then the project became so popular and more strategic for AWS that while it stayed open source, it was moved to be an “AWS Solution”.
https://github.com/aws-solutions
Even I who was still on the internal team at the time had to wait months and go through a series of justifications to get anything merged in to a release. I doubt now that even though I am still friends with the Principal Architect on the project among others could get a change merged in even though before I left I was still the third highest contributor because of all of the red tape.
On a happy note though. I saw what was going to happen before it got put under the AWS Solution group and I added as my last pull request an extension mechanism that allowed you to register Lambda extensions to extend the project without modifying the base code.