On Wed, May 4, 2016 at 2:40 PM, Daniel Dickinson <open...@daniel.thecshore.com> wrote: > On 16-05-04 12:25 PM, Kathy Giori wrote: >> Also wearing my hat within the prpl Foundation, which is funded by >> industry sponsorships that in turn provides financial support for >> OpenWrt, no one I have spoken to in prpl understands the reason for >> this spin-off either. It'll cause more confusion and inefficiency in >> industry. prpl will stick with OpenWrt, and I expect most companies >> who follow and/or contribute to OpenWrt will stick with it too. > > Silly question, but can you outline some specific examples of > contributions that an outsider like me has somehow missed as being as > concrete examples of companies contributing back to openwrt, rather than > just benefiting from it? >
Daniel I fully concur that industry "give back" is severely lacking. It seems to me that the bigger the company, the less likely they are to give back. One of the goals of the prpl Foundation was to help big industry members to better "see" that problem, and to use prpl to help them do something about it. I see two main reasons for the lack of contributions problem (not developer fault). 1. short-term focus. Industry rushes to meet product release schedules and managers are too often not aware of the downstream maintenance burdens they will face later, by not integrating their changes properly into the Linux kernel (and OpenWrt). 2. legal. I could blab about this problem for days, but mainly there is a fear of open source licensing when compared to the value of giving back. This type of FUD problem is perhaps one that prpl could help address too, through educational efforts. As an example of a contribution, prpl is promoting the OpenWrt "board farm" project, intended to support automated testing (of trunk) on various platforms on a daily basis. The test framework was in fact contributed by industry. Now imagine the new problem that industry faces if they want to give back. Do they have to push changes back into two different/similar project branches? Do they need to setup two board farms or double the test time? Will some companies choose to push to OpenWrt and others to LEDE, leaving the end-user to figure out which project's software will run on their board? In my opinion, the OpenWrt core team members need to setup some policies and procedures (e.g., take ideas from the LEDE objectives) that allow the fairness and flexibility that is desired, so that only one OpenWrt development branch continues to be developed. Reducing the core team to the LEDE subgroup will take away from the diversity of the project at the core, and I don't see that as a good thing. Yes, collaboration in a diverse environment is harder, but research has shown repeatedly that companies with staff diversity perform better. kathy _______________________________________________ openwrt-devel mailing list openwrt-devel@lists.openwrt.org https://lists.openwrt.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/openwrt-devel
