Thanks for your reply. I appreciate the engagement.
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I think you set up a false dichotomy between corporate open source and non-corporate open source. A better division would be between single organization projects and multi-organization projects. For example, OpenJDK is very much a corporate project - but in addition to Oracle, IBM, Apple and RedHat all have people heavily involved in development. That means that if Oracle were for whatever reason to lose interest the project wouldn't necessarily die (leaving aside patent issues).
On the other hand look at GWT, see in particular your colleague cromwellian excellent comments upthread. Here was a technology that Google was at one time devoting a great deal of resources to and was moving quickly and in exciting directions. A lot of companies built businesses on top of the GWT library. Now, for what seem like very good and valid reasons, Google has scaled back its efforts on the project. That's fine, but there is no community ready to pick up the slack. The reasons there is no one to pick up the slack are not technical or legal, but as you describe it "governance and social issue[s]".
When there is no path to becoming a committer, you are walled off from discussions about the future of the project and your patches are accepted reluctantly at best - why spend the time to deeply familiarize yourself with a codebase?
Except by being hired away by Google, which isn't exactly going to make your company thrilled to sponsor your work on a project.
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I think you set up a false dichotomy between corporate open source and non-corporate open source. A better division would be between single organization projects and multi-organization projects. For example, OpenJDK is very much a corporate project - but in addition to Oracle, IBM, Apple and RedHat all have people heavily involved in development. That means that if Oracle were for whatever reason to lose interest the project wouldn't necessarily die (leaving aside patent issues).
On the other hand look at GWT, see in particular your colleague cromwellian excellent comments upthread. Here was a technology that Google was at one time devoting a great deal of resources to and was moving quickly and in exciting directions. A lot of companies built businesses on top of the GWT library. Now, for what seem like very good and valid reasons, Google has scaled back its efforts on the project. That's fine, but there is no community ready to pick up the slack. The reasons there is no one to pick up the slack are not technical or legal, but as you describe it "governance and social issue[s]".
When there is no path to becoming a committer, you are walled off from discussions about the future of the project and your patches are accepted reluctantly at best - why spend the time to deeply familiarize yourself with a codebase?
Except by being hired away by Google, which isn't exactly going to make your company thrilled to sponsor your work on a project.