Hello, Many community patches are around for 3 months, unreviewed. [1] Last year (2011) things were looking better, and the UDP Tunnel patch, among others, was reviewed quickly, and went into the tree in 2 months.
I'd like to ask Oracle to open up development, and let old-time community members submit patches for VirtualBox directly. The problem of large sets of unofficial patches, is that they later result in official forks. I understand that you were busy with the Oracle SSO transition, but this is now over. My suggestions are: 1. let old-time community members submit patches to SVN tree directly (+active new members should get this ability too...). The benefit is that old-time community members will start reviewing patches by new community members. 2. Allow GPL-only code into the code tree, provided it can be disabled at compile time (so that Oracle VirtualBox will be shipped with those features disabled, under dual-license, GPL+PUEL). -- This is needed for some potential contributors. I believe that opening up direct community contributions is beneficial, provided those patches do not break the build for other users. The "community" window doesn't even have to stay open all the time, but only after major release and until the BETA of the next major release, while the window can be closed from the BETA and until final. This may increase the rate of community patches and, in the long-term, improve the product, overall. (despite the possibility of early bumps.) Can we come to some kind of agreement of how this can be done ? [1] List of OSS Community Contributions to OSE, including pending patches https://forums.virtualbox.org/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=36800 -- -Alexey Eromenko "Technologov", 13.02.2012. _______________________________________________ vbox-dev mailing list [email protected] https://www.virtualbox.org/mailman/listinfo/vbox-dev
