[probablyfiction]

"...the company wanted to invest as little time in the problem as possible so the person couldn't fix the tests, write new ones, or write a real fix. I don't blame the engineer, I blame their manager and their company."

This is spot on. Managers of software teams (and their bosses, all the way up to CTOs and CEOs) need to allow their engineers to contribute fixes to OSS with the understanding that it helps the community. There's also the added benefit of helping the business to develop a positive image in the OSS community.

This obviously is not always possible, and in some organizations it is never going to be possible. However, there are teams out there that do have the freedom and flexibility to give back to the community.

If enough teams begin contributing bug fixes to projects they find helpful, eventually this pervasive attitude the author writes about will change.

On a separate note, the author needs to stand up for himself more. A boilerplate e-mail with his hourly rate wouldn't take long to put together. If an issue is important enough to a company to bombard him with support requests, it's likely worth it to them to pay for a fix.

[mcguire]

All of the companies I've worked for have had no problem with an engineer investing the time to fix a problem in an open source project and doing the work to feed the fix upstream---that's the fastest way to get a problem they're having resolved, correctly and permanently.

On the other hand, many of the engineers themselves haven't had the interest in doing the work to contribute the fix. They fix the problem apparent to them and go on, repeatedly fixing the same problem when they are forced to upgrade (they don't upgrade willingly, either).

And then there's the projects that make contributing as difficult as possible. You not only have to diagnose and fix the problem, you have to update the tests and docs and build system (which I'm perfectly fine with, personally, in the name of quality if I know how to do so, which I may not since I don't have time to track everything) and you have to do so in such a way as to satisfy the whims of the project's real developers, which you as a mere user manifestly are not.

[rodgerd]

> Managers of software teams (and their bosses, all the way up to CTOs and CEOs) need to allow their engineers to contribute fixes to OSS with the understanding that it helps the community.

I was speaking with a free software developer about a position at her former employer. She warned me that while she enthusiastically recommended most aspects of the job, the worst, most frustrating, and generally unpleasant part of it was dealing with the upstream communities your managers would insist you get patches mainlined into.

The problems are not isolated to greedy employers.

[cwyers]

> Managers of software teams (and their bosses, all the way up to CTOs and CEOs) need to allow their engineers to contribute fixes to OSS with the understanding that it helps the community.

They NEED to? Or what? I need to drink water. If I don't, I die. What creates this need to allow engineers to help the community?

[johncolanduoni]

As with drinking water, you need to have a goal (e.g. surviving) to say need. I suspect GP was saying that they need to do that to have a non-parasitical relationship with open source projects they use.

[cwyers]

I mean, parasites get to sit around in the host and have a free lunch. You don't cure malaria by yelling at a bunch of Plasmodium falciparum about how they should be ashamed of themselves.