Tell you what: I'll let your business make millions from my code for free. You can even host it anywhere and do community management. If you want me to do these things, that can be bought at my normal project rates.
I didn't mean that to sound demanding, it's just a suggestion.
There is a middle ground between getting really involved, and just throwing the code over the fence, of course, such as responding to polite emails, with even a 'no thanks'. Perhaps you feel like you're already there, but my inclination is that if you're too busy, it'd be nice to set up something really simple where other people can coordinate.
It's not as if you're not using a great deal of other people's free code yourself. Indeed, if I make millions, I'd be happy to share some with you when I'm done sharing with Linus, the GCC guys, the Rails guys, the Ruby guys, the Gnome guys, the Postgres guys, the LibC guys, the Debian and Ubuntu guys, and heck, even RMS. I wonder what he'd like.
Actually, on a trip down memory lane, that sort of thing isn't entirely unheard of. Redhat and VA Linux both dished out shares to people involved in open source, which was pretty cool given how much of a pain in the neck it must have been.
I get quite a bit of email, some related to OSS and much not. Triage is generally customers first, everybody else as time permits. I star things in Gmail if I can't get to them immediately, but some starred things never get answered.
I would like for that to never happen, but there exist other things in life that I like more.
If a hypothetical person absolutely needs responses from me in a particular timeframe, I'm not adverse to talking retainers or SLAs.
And again, if you think an email list for A/Bingo users would increase world happiness, nihil obstat.
I sent you a patch for a problem (well, IMO) I had fixed, it wasn't anything important or where I was hoping for a response, it was something I was doing to be neighborly.
> And again, if you think an email list for A/Bingo users would increase world happiness, nihil obstat.
The idea was merely that it's generally not a big deal to run that kind of thing for a small project, and yes, there often are benefits. Generally, however, open source projects also benefit from being somewhat centralized: far fewer benefits accrue to everyone when various random people just run off and fork things willy nilly.
No, seriously: I apply patches which fit the vision, do not break the reference implementation on BCC, and do not cost me time from things I value in life. Happy to have them. That is, ballpark, half of patches. (The most common reason for not taking a patch is that people break Rails 2 behavior when trying to bug fix for Rails 3. The second is sometimes patches generate work, and if a "I have reasonable project rates" email is less work, that is what I'll usually do.)
