A Twitter discussion thread (a) (b, c, d) made me want to i) lay
out a definition for sustainable open source engineering, ii)
provide some examples you may not have thought of, and iii) find
out who else is doing a good job at it (or trying to, at the
very least!) Sustainable open source engineering refers to the
process of supporting a collection of free/libre and open source
software (FLOSS) over a very long period of time while following
the open source way. This means: - Patches to the software
collection must be pushed upstream where it makes sense; your
engineers need to be the ones to know and make the call. They
are the ones who have to track and maintain the delta with the
original upstream for many years. - Provide a open mechanism for
vendor partners and customers to collaborate on sustainability.
- Do all this in an open and transparent fashion. Anything
important not covered by this list? Where a typical value of
FLOSS is to allow for a small(er) investment as a contributor to
yield a large(r) r