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Comment by alacombe | Hacker News Reader

I worked for 5 years for a company taking from *BSD and not contributing much. Lately they started monetary donation, but no code.

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Weirdly, I actually think that's a feature not a bug. It keep ill intentioned idiots from gumming up the works because they are forced to contribute and really don't have the corporate beliefs or culture that would make them productive and not a distraction.

The problem is that BSD problem is not so much money, but manpower, on top of that the cathedral model does not really scale. Just from a technical standpoint, no BSD is using any modern DCVS, beside dragonfly.

Money is always a problem, and fixes a lot of manpower issues when you can pay developers. The whole DCVS is a bizarre argument. I would have to see actual studies that show the BSD run organizations do not scale.

Lack of proper DCVS hinder the possibility of committers to publish early version of their work outside huge diff. Getting the code and submitting changes are a huge PITA. With the git/github/gitlab workflow, you can clone a project, fork it, push a fix and submit a PR faster than a CVS / SVN checkout. It's not hard to find out why 90's cathedral style hierarchies hinder development process.

That being said, unless you are already a committer, it's gonna be very difficult to get your code blessed...

That being said, unless you are already a committer, it's gonna be very difficult to get your code blessed...

Are there examples of this? Since I see people sending patches that aren't committers. I honestly would want to see some actual data.

Frustrating experience.

>because they are forced to contribute

but they aren't. GPL forces to release source, not contribute.

That’s a contribution and then they feel entitled because folks who don’t see the business case in the first place are going to be a pain.

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