From a short-term business perspective, sure, it doesn't make financial sense.
As a user of software, though, I want someone to fix the bug. I want software that doesn't have bugs. So let me repeat my original statement. We need more like this that are willing to spend engineer time fixing bugs, even upstream bugs in open source projects. Instead of prioritizing shoving half-baked features out the door for next week's press release.
[Author here] Even from a short-term business perspective, it actually might make sense to fix things and contribute upstream. When you face a problem with something you built using FOSS, essentially you have three choices:
- Work around it, most likely creating technical debt inside your organization in the process
- Invest the time to fix it yourself
- Pay someone else to fix it for you (e.g. the original authors via a support contract)
None of these options is for free, and which one is the most cost-effective depends largely on the complexity of the issue at hand, the skillset and availability of the people involved and the criticality of the impacted system.
As a user of software, though, I want someone to fix the bug. I want software that doesn't have bugs. So let me repeat my original statement. We need more like this that are willing to spend engineer time fixing bugs, even upstream bugs in open source projects. Instead of prioritizing shoving half-baked features out the door for next week's press release.