Open source software is not a one-way street. If you had spent as much effort on this gripe post as participating in the community (or even reading the docs!) then you would have had the answers to your questions rather than having to roll your own framework.

But now he has something better than django that he can use on his next project. It works well for the kinds of projects he builds, and does what he expects. He wins.

There's no reason to contribute it back to the community, because it's specifically targeted to his needs (and therefore wouldn't be considered better by anybody outside his team). Spending even an hour polishing it up for somebody else's consumption would be a distraction.

But if he would contribute back, then -everyone- would have something better than the (current) django. That is how it works. I agree with grandparent poster that more people should take the time to contribute and/or make their changes available.

That said, at least he documented things and presented his issues cogently so that the dev team can see where issues are, and possibly address them in the future.

Not likely. I'm a big advocate of rolling your own framework that meets your (and only your) needs.

The thing we use at Expat is incredibly fast and turns out really good code. It's the reason we can move so fast, and it's a competitive advantage. But I wouldn't release it to the world.

It just has too many optimizations for the way we like to do things. And there's still the matter of the order-of-magnitude gap in level of effort between something you use in house and something you can release as a product.

Right now, this guy has something stripped down to the bare essentials to do what his shop does. Ideally, he's shed all the useless garbage that naturally accumulates in any commercial framework the size of django. And as a result, the final product probably isn't of any use to anybody outside his team.