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Comment by znpy | Hacker News Reader

On one hand yes, on the other hand if you want your patch to be included it's your job to make it reviewable and to make it pass all the various checks.

After all, we all lived long enough without their software, we can live without it a bit longer.

Yes it's a gift, but it's also code that has to be maintained and updated along with the kernel, so it's not really 100% a gift. If you then consider that they might keep on selling a proprietary version of the code (which - don't get me wrong - is 100% legit and fair) they might also get basically free labour: they could rebase onto the latest public gpl version, they might get notes of various issues and bugs...

Quite literally, it's free labour.

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“Free as in puppy.”

This is a wonderful description of "free" to go along with "free as in beer" and "free as in speech", thanks!

It turns out someone (could be you?) wrote a Medium article about open-source software using the "free as in puppy" metaphor, although I don't think that they really used in the same way you are here with regards to a corporation using the open-source community to functionally receive free labor. I'm definitely going to add it to my mental list...

[1] https://medium.com/swlh/free-as-in-puppy-5b7eb1bf3908

Wasn’t me. Gifts bearing obligations come in a lot of shapes and sizes, I just always found the puppy metaphor very compelling and so I like to use it.

(As a mental exercise sometime, go to a pet store and figure out how much a “$12 hamster” costs once you get everything you need to set up and maintain a habitat.)

It's a beautiful metaphor.

Puppies can bring a lot of joy, but they certainly bring obligations.

Really spot on.

I've not heard this one before. Like a White Elephant but useful.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_elephant

This is such a perfect addition to free as in beer/speech. Really quite surprised I haven't seen this more often, going to be using it haha

> f you want your patch to be included it's your job to make it reviewable

I have a mid-junior level co-worker who submits PRs that are excessively large. As best I've been able to determine, he's not especially good at managing the dependencies in his code, and he doesn't want to submit a broken PR, so his default is to wait until he gets everything written instead of breaking it down into smaller pieces.

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