The LiMo Foundation has published an
interesting white paper [PDF] on the economic value of working with the
development community. “The cost of forking and losing connection
with upstream development is twofold: i) the corresponding cost of presumed
beneficial unleveraged potential, ii) the further cost of having to
re-engineer modified forked code in the future to accommodate the
inevitable eventual re-sync with upstream. We quantified the former to show
that the figures run into $millions for important components such as GTK,
WebKit, GStreamer and BlueZ.” (By way of Dave
Neary).