[development] enterprise needs

[Darrel O'Pry]

On Mon, 2006-02-27 at 20:11 -0800, Nedjo Rogers wrote:
<snip>
> But this small distinction gets fairly near the core of the issues we're 
> discussing.  The situation is that a lot of (paid, economically significant) 
> work depends on volunteer contributions--from Dries on down to module 
> maintainers.
> 
> The thing about volunteers is that you can't really require them to do work. 
> They'll contribute largely what they want to, what interests and motivates 
> them.  Generally speaking, when there's limited time available, doing 
> maintenance on old releases is often going to rate relatively low when 
> measured up against, e.g., getting an innovative new version out.
> 
> So maybe the question really becomes: how do we enable those who depend on 
> old releases to contribute to maintaining them?

<snip>

If your economic welfare depends on drupal, set up a cvs/svn/bzr
repository with drupal 4.6 as a vendor branch, make the changes and bug
fixes you need. You should be willing to contribute your upgrades back
to the community and hope they get accepted back into the main tree. 

The fact is your business needs are probably immediate, the development
communities needs are probably less immediate than your friday deadline.
If you want to build your business on an open source foundation, be
prepared to do some work.

You can't guarantee that community process will conform to your
businesses needs, or that if they do conform for a period, that they
will stay that way.

.darrel.