Supporting the Giants
April 5th, 2011 by Benjamin Pollack
One of the things that I mentioned when I discussed the importance of having a mission is that the Kiln team’s real purpose in life is to bring the awesomeness of distributed source control to as many people as possible. While we do a lot of that by making Kiln into the best source code management system available, we’re hardly doing it alone: Kiln builds off the amazing base provided by the Mercurial distributed version control system. Mercurial helps make Kiln what it is. For Kiln to really achieve what we want it to achieve, we need to help Mercurial itself shine, too.
This year, at Fog Creek, we’re doing that in two different ways:
- First, we’re helping sponsor the Mercurial 1.9 code sprint. The code sprint is where the Mercurial developers have a chance to talk face-to-face to solve outstanding issues, agree on how to implement major new features, fix piles of bugs, and so on.
- Second, we’ll be sending one of our own Kiln developers so that we can contribute some actual manpower to the bug fixing and feature development that goes on at the sprint.
This kind of paying back to open-source software is becoming increasingly common. Even when StackOverflow was brand-new, Jeff and Joel were already donating to support the projects that made StackOverflow possible, and they’ve kept up that tradition as StackOverflow has grown. I think this is a great way to pay back the open-source community, and to help further the creation of more great open-source tools.
If you’re interesting in helping the Mercurial project, the easiest way to help them out is to donate to the project or the sprint.
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