[sjellis]

> I think what you mean is "I get the idealism but you also need to be realistic." It's not pragmatic to stand your guns and ask a multi-million dollar company to change the code they submit to your open-source project.

That has basically been Linus' Torvalds job for the last 20 years. People want to contribute to the Linux kernel to get support for the thing that they are interested in, but often the code that they are offering should not be accepted as-is, because it will make Linux as a whole that bit worse. See DBus for an example where clever people strongly put forward useful functionality, and got push-back. The end result was that they went back to the drawing board, and designed something better.

AIUI, the reason that the AMD and nVidia proprietary graphics drivers are a terrifying mass of hacks on top of hacks is trying to say yes to everything. Years later, the vendors can only move forward by setting fire to the whole lot.