Saxon

No, we're not considering any change in platform at the moment.

We're also not actively seeking contributions from outside the team, though we're always happy to listen to suggestions and proposals. One of the difficulties in having a project that is half open source and half proprietary is that external contributors can't see (and more particularly, can't test) the effect of changes to the open source code on the proprietary code, which inevitably means that any external contributions need to be very carefully assessed and tested before we can integrate them.

In the past I've found that people are very willing to write a few hundred lines of code to implement a new feature, but it's very hard to persuade them to contribute 100 new automated test cases to test that feature, let alone to run 100,000 regression tests to make sure nothing else has broken (and in fairness, it doesn't help that we've never got around to making it easy for people to learn how to run those regression tests and investigate any failures). One of the difficulties is that a certain amount of our test material, particularly performance tests, comes from customers and has to be regarded as confidential, and it's not easy to separate that part from the rest.

Except in specialised areas like localisation, I've generally found that ideas contributed by the open source community are very valuable, but code contributions are usually more trouble than they are worth. Writing code is the easy part and the fun part of the job: testing it, supporting it, and maintaining it are the costly part.