jens> Has this been discussed before and what are the reasons not to merge jens> with LLVM?
Thank you for your email. The licensing, build systems, target platforms and project directions differ for the two projects. These aspects in themselves would preclude a simple project merge. But more importantly, the number of volunteer hours available for coding or project management would remain the same irrespective of the banner under which the volunteer work happens. It is not clear to me how a change of banner would make a difference here. Most open-source projects today are unsustainable for their developers. Please see the following study: Software Below the Poverty Line https://staltz.com/software-below-the-poverty-line.html For some developers their open-source maintainership responsibilities also negatively affect their employability. This is because typical employment contracts assert complete ownership over work by employees (even the employee's free time work). Between two candidates of equal merit, the one requiring no changes to the standard employment contract would be the easier hire. These are some of the reasons why open-source maintainer burnout isn't uncommon. Please see: Burn out and/or quitting open source https://github.com/bzg/opensource-challenges >From what I can see, long running open-source projects tend to fall into one of a few camps: 1. Projects with a corporate core and a transient volunteer base. In these projects a handful of salaried employees maintain project continuity, while the unpaid contributors join, contribute for a few years, and then leave. 2. Projects hosted in academia (i.e. effectively tax-payer funded in some countries), where a steady stream of researchers and students keep the projects going while earning their degrees. 3. Projects whose maintainers willingly take the personal hit, in service to some higher ideology. 4. Free time (hobby) projects, where people write code because they like writing code. Personally speaking, I treat *BSD work as being in category '4'. This means that I prioritize what I personally find to be interesting, given the limited number of volunteer hours available. I am not against working closely with a different project such as LLVM - why duplicate effort after all - but I would not want to take on commitments without also having the ability to deliver them in a timely manner. This means that sustainability would need to be addressed first. Suggestions for improving project sustainability would be welcome. Regards, Joseph Koshy _______________________________________________ Elftoolchain-developers mailing list Elftoolchain-developers@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/elftoolchain-developers
