3 ms·
Good point, I had never thought about it quite that in depth before. However, I am still willing to contend that large companies who can afford the staff do (o
by tsally 17y ago
Good point, I had never thought about it quite that in depth before. However, I am still willing to contend that large companies who can afford the staff do (or should) have large internal patch sets for OpenSSH, FreeBSD, etc. You can be sure the NSA does. ;-)
- cperciva 17y agoI am still willing to contend that large companies who can afford the staff do (or should) have large internal patch sets for OpenSSH, FreeBSD, etc. This absolutely happens -- I know of lots of companies which do this, for a wide variety of reasons. Some companies have local patches which aren't contributed back because they simply aren't relevant to the community at large; for example, I know of one large FreeBSD-using company which at one point had if (strcmp(fname, "mysql")) { /* Handle mysql processes specially */ ... } blocks in their kernel. Other companies have local patches simply because they're not sure exactly how to go about contributing changes back -- either due to a lack of knowledge about open source in general, or because they started with a source tree and started hacking, and aren't sure exactly what they've changed. I've seen job postings with "get the changes we've been making locally for the past five years into the FreeBSD tree" high on the list of job responsibilities. And then, of course, you're right that there are some companies which have changes which they could contribute back, but choose not to. But based on the companies I've talked to (which, admittedly, is a biassed sample), this doesn't seem to be a very common scenario.