Time passes by and another project nears its end. For the past several
months I have worked on a project for Bosch involving Clutter, Mx and
WebKit and have had the pleasure of interacting daily with the upstream
communities.
I feel I have been lucky because many of the companies that are starting to base their products on FOSS fail to understand the dynamics that will allow them to make the most from the components they are reusing. In this particular case, Bosch has understood that a big part of the value of FOSS resides in the possibility of adapting the software to their specific needs, and also in sharing the burden of maintaining the software with other organizations.
For that to be practical, you have to resist the urge to settle at the beginning of the project on specific stable releases, because if you do, you not only will miss new features and many bug fixes that will land only in the unstable branch, but you will have a much harder time integrating upstream whatever modifications you make. This situation often leads to companies having to maintain forks of the components they had to modify, and that's when the costs start spiraling up. David Neary wrote recently about in The Cost of Going it Alone.
Additionally, by working within the upstream community you will be doing so side-by-side with the people that are most knowledgeable about that specific component, either because they have been working on it for a long time, or quite often, because they are its creators. This is going to massively increase the chances that whatever modifications you end up doing are done in the best way and also that they will be integrated upstream and become maintained by other parties.
Besides technological soundness and reduced maintenance costs, there was an additional factor that made even more important the collaboration with upstream: Bosch had devised a new user experience that pushed the limits of the UI toolkit because of being innovative and because of scalability reasons. And understandably, they didn't want to compromise there because that innovative UI brought a lot of value to their product.
Getting into a FOSS community can be tough sometimes (specially if it's your first time), but in this case I have had the luck of finding a very open community in Clutter, well resourced and with a clear idea of how to deal with those contributions that can bring the most to the project. I take this opportunity to congratulate and thank the colleagues at the Clutter team at Intel OTC: Emmanuele Bassi, Robert Bragg, Neil Roberts, Thomas Wood, Brian Peel and Chris Lord (now at Mozilla).
Here comes a summary of the contributions sponsored by Collabora on behalf of Bosch:
- 16 commits to Clutter, most notably adding the base for gesture-based actions and several improvements to ClutterEffect subclasses.
- 16 commits to Mx, mainly on MxKineticScrollView
- 5 commits to WebKit's Clutter port, the most notable change was allowing the user to explicitly load images
- Filed 30 bugs in total
Besides thanking the individuals mentioned above, I would like to send big kudos to Bosch, Collabora and Intel for the courage and insight shown when investing in this new way of working together that we call Open Source.
You can read more about the Clutter port of WebKit here and about Collabora's involvement in WebKit here.
I feel I have been lucky because many of the companies that are starting to base their products on FOSS fail to understand the dynamics that will allow them to make the most from the components they are reusing. In this particular case, Bosch has understood that a big part of the value of FOSS resides in the possibility of adapting the software to their specific needs, and also in sharing the burden of maintaining the software with other organizations.
For that to be practical, you have to resist the urge to settle at the beginning of the project on specific stable releases, because if you do, you not only will miss new features and many bug fixes that will land only in the unstable branch, but you will have a much harder time integrating upstream whatever modifications you make. This situation often leads to companies having to maintain forks of the components they had to modify, and that's when the costs start spiraling up. David Neary wrote recently about in The Cost of Going it Alone.
Additionally, by working within the upstream community you will be doing so side-by-side with the people that are most knowledgeable about that specific component, either because they have been working on it for a long time, or quite often, because they are its creators. This is going to massively increase the chances that whatever modifications you end up doing are done in the best way and also that they will be integrated upstream and become maintained by other parties.
Besides technological soundness and reduced maintenance costs, there was an additional factor that made even more important the collaboration with upstream: Bosch had devised a new user experience that pushed the limits of the UI toolkit because of being innovative and because of scalability reasons. And understandably, they didn't want to compromise there because that innovative UI brought a lot of value to their product.
Getting into a FOSS community can be tough sometimes (specially if it's your first time), but in this case I have had the luck of finding a very open community in Clutter, well resourced and with a clear idea of how to deal with those contributions that can bring the most to the project. I take this opportunity to congratulate and thank the colleagues at the Clutter team at Intel OTC: Emmanuele Bassi, Robert Bragg, Neil Roberts, Thomas Wood, Brian Peel and Chris Lord (now at Mozilla).
Here comes a summary of the contributions sponsored by Collabora on behalf of Bosch:
- 16 commits to Clutter, most notably adding the base for gesture-based actions and several improvements to ClutterEffect subclasses.
- 16 commits to Mx, mainly on MxKineticScrollView
- 5 commits to WebKit's Clutter port, the most notable change was allowing the user to explicitly load images
- Filed 30 bugs in total
Besides thanking the individuals mentioned above, I would like to send big kudos to Bosch, Collabora and Intel for the courage and insight shown when investing in this new way of working together that we call Open Source.
You can read more about the Clutter port of WebKit here and about Collabora's involvement in WebKit here.
