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Why do more widely-adopted OSS take so long to review patches? (kbin.melroy.org)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

10 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Take Firefox's 1542044, where the dark mode theme colors aren't exposed when they should. The patch has been up for 4 years.

Or, take this, which is part of a series that added Doxygen parsing to clangd, a language server. It was left unreviewed until late 2022, the patcher went in conversation with the reviewer, but then met radio silence again, long enough to the point where the patch-reviewing service shut down. Clangd currently has only 44 open PRs to review, though it uses the same issue tracker as llvm for some reason.

Aren't we paying them to do all this?

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[–] [email protected] 56 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

Aren’t we paying them to do all this?

No? This question indicates a fundamental lack of understanding of the social relations, power dynamics, and motivations in open source software.

[–] InfiniteStruggle 5 points 9 months ago (3 children)

How do I learn more about these things?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 9 months ago

One possible starting point could be the now classic essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cathedral_and_the_Bazaar

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago) (1 children)

I don't know, if there's a more general resource, but in the case of Firefox, the donations are so far away from covering the development costs, that they're not even being used for that. Rather, they earn money from search engine deals and are trying to diversify with Pocket, ads, MDN- and VPN-related services etc..

In the case of LLVM, I don't see how they would get many donations to begin with. Maybe Mozilla chips them some of that leftover donation money (they have been doing that with various smaller OSS projects), but I can't imagine much else.
LLVM is probably largely being kept alive by companies or programming language orgs scratching their own itches.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

This is a good question. I learned it the slow, hard way, back when Apache was “a patchy server”. Maybe someone can suggest books or online resources for getting up to speed quicker.

[–] [email protected] 41 points 9 months ago

Aren't we paying them to do all this?

That's the neat part, actually: we don't.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 9 months ago

I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure a lot of open source software is volunteer based and unpaid.

There might be cases where orgs will lend developers to work on a project, but with the org's interests in mind, so if the patch isn't in their interest, then those devs won't look at it.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Aren’t we paying them to do all this?

Are you? Firefox is free to use.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

What I meant was donations. As said below, these might not be much.