Neary: The Cost of Going it Alone

Not everyone agrees with this, I was chatting with a developer in the periphery of the Nokia/Maemo/MeeGo ecosystem and his position was basically "Upstream is no go for a serious company project", due to stuff like feature removal and lack of control.

From my personal experience working in a startup, it isn't feasible to upstream everything while working on it, there will always be higher priority things to do, like the next must-have feature or that bug that affects N people. Of course once the business is better established there might be that possibility, or once the startup is dead if the ex-managers are sympathetic and ex-developers are sufficiently motivated. There is major pain associated with this way of working, but I think might just be necessary.

Neary's article is an important thing to show bosses to get their priorities changed. Everyone go do it now.