| Software longevity is something that I have bene thinking about for a little bit. At $dayjob, we use Openstack, an open source cloud infrastructure project. It's a pretty complicated set of projects that interact to each other in order to provide multi-tenancy for virtual machines at scale. It was initially all the rage, before the cloud starting really picking up steam. So now, you have a massive project that is slowly losing traction, but also relying on that notoriety to gain developers. So, I think Linus point is quite valid. These small, low risk, low value patches are essential in having a healthy community around a product. They help easing your way into a codebase, developpement flow and all the other idiosyncrasies of established tech circles. |