I went to All Things Open and asked booth staff (of corporate booths) “do you contribute to open source at your day job?”<p>All were a little surprised by the question. Most interpreted it as “do you release and maintain your own open source software under the banner of your company.” When I clarified that I would count spending time to make a quality issue reproduction or fixing a bug and sending a PR, I got one person who said they had. They sent a patch to fix a bug, when I dug in why: they told me there were zero workarounds and the bug blocked a critical feature, if they didn’t upstream a fix successfully they would have to fork and take on maintenance (of that fork).<p>I share this, because I feel that the many developers don’t quite realize that they are able to do these actions (bystander effect). And many don’t know how to speak up and advocate for that work in a professional setting.<p>It’s true that corporate ties to open source are pervasive. I also feel that there’s a huge untapped potential of people who are willing to contribute but aren’t ready or aren’t able.<p>My talk (on teaching developers how to contribute to open source) wasn’t recorded, but a longer, earlier version was at PhillyETE <a href="https://chariotsolutions.com/screencast/philly-ete-2023-how-to-steal-from-maintainers-richard-schneeman/" rel="nofollow">https://chariotsolutions.com/screencast/philly-ete-2023-how-...</a>. I also maintain a free service for contributors getting started <a href="https://www.codetriage.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.codetriage.com/</a> and wrote a paid book on the topic <a href="https://howtoopensource.dev/" rel="nofollow">https://howtoopensource.dev/</a>.
<i>We should update mental models of who works on open source accordingly</i> [corporations vs individuals]<p>I would like to see some numbers on how much code labeled "open source" (as opposed to having more of a free software ideology) is contributed by corporations and their employees, versus individuals<p>I think it's been very clear for 20+ years that the largest open source projects have corporate origins, or big corporate contributors, as I mentioned here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35941074">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35941074</a> (Linux kernel, LLVM, Firefox, Chrome, MySQL, JVM, VSCode, Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc.)<p>But I wonder what happens when you look at medium size projects and libraries, like those in PyPI, NPM, the Go or Rust package ecosystems, etc.<p>Are corporations contributing closer to 20% of the code, or 80% of the code? I think there is a lot of code contributed by medium size companies, e.g. in the PHP ecosystem there seem to be many little companies
Corporate influence on open source has served to narrow down the tools that are able to gain adoption, irrespective of their utility, often going against what users want.<p>For example, many developers despise React.js; I once interviewed for a dev role for Facebook years ago and they asked me if "I had any qualms about using React" (paraphrasing) and the interviewer acknowledged that many candidates did not like using React... Yet React has a near-monopoly on frontend frameworks.<p>The whole media landscape around open source dev tools has been a nightmare. We're being pushed in specific directions, towards a small number of silver bullet solutions which do not suit most use cases.<p>It feels like all the authors of popular tools form a corporate insider clique and no tools outside of that social network is allowed to get any traction at all.