I'm a sponsored maintainer of some other open source project (under a different handle). In my experience, companies rarely sponsor for altruistic purposes. You need to be working on some project that brings value to the company. Where I work we were told to spend 1 hour a week on reviews/maintainence work. Personally, depending on the complexity of the patch it can be impossible to check the correctness of the patch in a one hour timeframe.
TBH with the linux kernel I agree with Linus's interpretation. Email based patching is probably what keeps new contributors away (and you need new contributors to become maintainers...). In my experience you get several types of contributors:
1. Drive-by contributors
2. Regular contributors
Drive by contributors tend to be people who either are students looking to make a name for themselves or people who consume your product for a living. Regular contributors are generally people who are actually paid to work on the software. Drive by contributors may become regular contributors if they use your work regularly. Being on a platform like github significantly lowers the barrier for entry for drive-by contributors. I myself frequently patch downstream oss stuff that we depend on every now and then in a drive-by fashion. I only patch stuff thats on github/gitlab cause setting up a new software for patching is time consuming for me. Additonally the github/gitlab UX for suggesting changes is so much better than the email ux as you can specify exactly what is wrong/disagreeable. CI also is super useful as I don;t actually need to run every test myself when reviewing stuff.
TBH with the linux kernel I agree with Linus's interpretation. Email based patching is probably what keeps new contributors away (and you need new contributors to become maintainers...). In my experience you get several types of contributors:
1. Drive-by contributors
2. Regular contributors
Drive by contributors tend to be people who either are students looking to make a name for themselves or people who consume your product for a living. Regular contributors are generally people who are actually paid to work on the software. Drive by contributors may become regular contributors if they use your work regularly. Being on a platform like github significantly lowers the barrier for entry for drive-by contributors. I myself frequently patch downstream oss stuff that we depend on every now and then in a drive-by fashion. I only patch stuff thats on github/gitlab cause setting up a new software for patching is time consuming for me. Additonally the github/gitlab UX for suggesting changes is so much better than the email ux as you can specify exactly what is wrong/disagreeable. CI also is super useful as I don;t actually need to run every test myself when reviewing stuff.