Subj : Re: Hi all!
To   : tenser
From : hyjinx
Date : Sat Sep 27 2025 09:27 am

 te> Why not upstream all of that?  A great question, with a few different
 te> answers.  One is that some of it couldn't; some stuff had been done
 te> in collaboration with a vendor, under NDA, and Google was legally
 te> barred from sending that code upstream.  Some was because, even
 te> though there was no significant intellectual property concerns, code
 te> might be so Google-specific that it didn't make sense to send upstream;
 te> much of that is historical baggage, but getting rid of it takes time.
 te> But probably the biggest reason was that it wasn't economically viable
 te> for a lot of stuff.  Google might make a change that was a win, but
 te> for a specific, constrained use-case.  It may be cool to upstream, but
 te> when it's sent someone looks at it and says, "yeah, this is neat, but
 te> it only works for n=1; you should generalize it for any n."  Except
 te> that doing that generalization might be 10x the work of the current
 te> patch: the engineer can't justify the investment because it provides
 te> no additional value to Google, so it's easier to just float the patch.
 te> Of course, over time, that decision is more expensive than doing the
 te> work and getting the thing upstreamed, but we're talking about a 5-10
 te> year timeline here.

This is a really interesting insight. I bet more people would like to know the inner workings of contribution in the corporate fed open source world. If you'd ever consider wrapping this convo into dialogue that you'd be willing to share to a wider audience, I'd love to interview you for the YouTube channel. Let me know if you're interested.

Cheers,
Al


hyjinx // Alistair Ross
Author of 'Back to the BBS' Documentary: https://bit.ly/3tRINeL (YouTube)
alsgeeklab.com

--- Mystic BBS v1.12 A49 2024/05/29 (Linux/64)
 * Origin: bbs.alsgeeklab.com:2323 (21:1/126)

.