[asterisk-biz] Res: 2008 Predictions

[Russell Bryant]

Flavio Goncalves wrote:
> Patches, patches and patches, because Digium will not commit most of
> them to the source code.

I disagree with this prediction.

If we don't commit patches, it's not because we don't want to, it is simply an
issue of resources.  We have software team of about a dozen people, most of
which are _completely_ dedicated to working on open source development for
Asterisk.  Can you name even _one_ other company that pays even _one_ developer
to work full time on open source Asterisk development?

In fact, handling community bug reports and community patches is what we spent
about 90% of our time doing in 2007.

The first issue submitted to bugs.digium.com in the year of 2007 was issue
#8701.  The last one submitted was issue # 11661.  That means that 2960 issues
were reported.  That's an average of just under 250 new submissions every month.
 Also, there are currently about 350 issues open, which is pretty close to the
number of open issues at the beginning of 2007, so we really did process that
many issues in 2007.

I would estimate that about 1/3 of the 2960 issues were community patch
submissions.  Then, about 95% of the remaining portion were bug reports that
required development effort to debug and fix.  The other few were closed without
any commit for one reason or another (configuration issue, for example).

So, "Digium will not commit most of them to the source code".  Do you actually
think that we have some intention to not serve the developer community?  I know
that a lot of this type of work isn't very visible, unless you really go looking
in the svn commit history, or spend a lot of time on bugs.digium.com, but
hopefully I have helped to point out that we actually do a good job at serving
the development community.  While we still have some things to improve on so
that patch submission to commit turnaround is quicker, we are certainly working
very hard at it, and committing _a lot_ of patches, already.

-- 
Russell Bryant
Senior Software Engineer
Open Source Team Lead
Digium, Inc.