Giving up upstream-ing my patches and feel free to pick them up

I confess, I'm an old guy, who was around when Open Source was still young. Being able to read the code, learn to be z better programmer, tweak it to my needs, control what was running on my machine.

Reading other comments on this thread it seems like the mood has shifted. Now there seems to be an expectation that Open Source means "you should promptly review and accept my changes".

There is much wailing that corporates (who, by the way, never used to release code at all) are somehow at fault for either existing, or not responding quick enough or requiring paperwork(!).

I'm not sure when pushing code upstream to Open Source became an entitlement. I'm pretty sure it wasn't there at the beginning and it's nor part if any license I'm aware of.

Regardless of the contents,

> For each of my emails, I got a reply, saying that they "sincerely apologize" and "@Dalibor Topic Can you please review...", with no actual progress being made.

then

> Sorry to hear this. .... @Dalibor Topic <dalibor.topic at oracle.com>, can we get this prioritized?

This is pretty morbidly funny.

I have been trying to upstream patches to kubernetes and etcd for about a year and ended up giving up. It is impossible to get someone from the project to review my PRs, and since I cannot get PRs under my belt I can not become a maintainer either.

My suspicion is that you get ghosted if you don’t have a @google or @redhat email address and really the only way to become a contributor is to be buddies with someone who works on the project already.

I have considered going to one of the CNCF committee meetings and being like, hey you guys are not accepting new contributions which goes against your mandate. But in the end I just maintain local patches that don’t get upstreamed which is easier.

I know Java has a complicated history of ownership, but I'm not sure I understand why Oracle is able to block contributions to OpenJDK. I thought the point of OpenJDK was to be separate from Oracle. I'm not a Java developer, just curious how this works.

Despite their OSS contributions, and the fact that they have their own Linux distro, oracle is one of the worst companies to deal with in terms of OSS. Very NIH syndrome, very gatekeep-y. I refuse to use grub because I know I'll never get bugs fixed since oracle claims ownership of the repo there as well.

When I want to contribute to an open source project, I throw together some trivial but useful patches and see how the project responds.

Many projects behave this way, particularly those with corporate overlords. At best, it will take weeks to get a simple patch reviewed. By then, I have moved on, at least with my intention to send anything upstream. I commend the author for giving them a whole year, but I have found that is best a recipe for disappointment.

Maintainers: how you react to patches and PRs significantly influence whether or not you get skilled contributors. When I was maintaining such projects, I always tried to reply within 24 hours to new contributors.

It would be interesting to see how quickly the retention rate drops off as the time to review/accept patches goes up. I imagine it looks like an exponential drop off.

Any asipiring commentor should note that dalibor has responded, and it doesn't sound like he's unreasonable

https://mail.openjdk.org/pipermail/hotspot-dev/2026-January/...

I signed the OCA in 2021 as part of some contributions to GraalVM.

The process was much more involved than anything I'd previously signed, and it was slow, but in my case eventually got approved.

It mostly involved some emails with an actual human and PDF's to be docu-signed.

All of the https://github.com/AOSC-Tracking/jdk/ links 404 for me, so it's difficult to get a sense of what was being done. Going off of the "loongson fork" links though they look rather trivial. Not saying they should be ignored, but I do think trivial PRs to large critical open source projects like JDK can often end up taking more time away from contributing engineers doing reviews and testing than they are worth.

I know first-hand the frustration of having PRs ignored and it can be quite demoralizing, so I do feel for the author. It sounds like the author is getting to a place of peace with it, and my advice from having been down that path before is to do exactly that, and find something else interesting to hack on.

I have this theory that with LLMs getting better at writing code our current open source model (relatively few large projects that everyone contributes to, relatively rare to maintain your own fork) will invert and it will be easier and more common for people to have personalized forks and a lot of the problems around managing large open source projects will just become irrelevant

Would there be a difference in contributing to OpenJDK vs to, say, Temurin or Zulu Java? How separated are those Java JDKs really from OpenJDK?

Judging from the whole thread, might just be some misunderstanding of the workflow?

I am not surprised. Oracle acquiring Sun Microsystems has been the death kneel of open source Java ecosystem.

Never forget: One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison still runs this company.

In a response Dalibor Topic claims that he rejected some of his submission have been rejected. So one of them is lying?

why do they waste all that ai writing new patches instead of helping them upstream existing patches?

[dead]

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The PRs they link mostly seem like noise? “Remove the d prefix from this number because the C++ standard doesn’t require it”. Yeah great.