[U-Boot] Patches for in-house board

[Wolfgang Denk]

Dear Jared,

In message <4912868E.2080002 at genesysdesign.com.au> you wrote:
> 
> We are a consulting firm that has produced a product for a client which 
> contains at Atmel AT91SAM9263 running linux. I have registed a machine 
> type at kernel.org and have ported both u-boot and the kernel to it. I 
> have created patches to add this support against u-boot HEAD. Is it 
> standard practice to submit the patches to u-boot or is it preferred 
> that I only make them available to the client?

U-Boot is Free Software, and it is basicly up to you (and/or your
client) to decide what you do with the port (of course your client has
to make the source code available to his customers as required by the
GPL, but that's a different story).

If you want to do your client a favor (i. e. if you are looking for a
long-term relationship to that client) then you  should  submit  your
patches and try to get these merged into mainline. Otherwise you will
find  that  your port is very quickly (within few weeks) so different
from the mainline version, that attempts  to  update  it  later  (for
example  to  benefit from recent fixes or additions in mainline) will
require a *substancial* amount of work.

Best regards,

Wolfgang Denk

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