Connexion
Igalia celebrates "Twenty-Five Years Upstream"
The open-source consulting firm Igalia has put out an
announcement celebrating 25 years of working on upstream FOSS projects
for its clients. The list of projects the company has worked on is rather
eye-opening: WebKit, mobile-browser rendering (on Maemo, Moblin, MeeGo, and
Tizen), the Linux kernel (CPU and GPU scheduling), 3D graphics drivers, the
Orca screen reader,
GStreamer, and lots more. Beyond that, the company, which is a
worker-owned cooperative, does its work in ways that benefit the community
as well as its clients:
None of this is charity. Igalia is a consultancy, and most of the work above was paid for by someone with a product to ship: a device maker who needs the web to run well on their hardware, a platform that needs a feature its users keep asking for, a company whose roadmap depends on something deep in the stack working better than it does today. What they get from us is not a patch to carry forever. We do the work upstream, in the project itself, so it arrives in the next release and keeps working long after the contract ends. Our customers ship products built on code that nobody has to maintain alone, and everyone else gets the same code. That has been the arrangement from the start.
