No, It's (Still) Never Too Late to Upstream Your Legacy Linux Based Platforms - Neil Armstrong, Linaro
Nearly 7 years ago, I already spoke about this subject in Berlin, and it's still very true. You maintain or used to maintain a Linux based board or SoC off-tree ? Then there are plenty of reasons for you to push your changes to the mainline Linux. Some will say it's too late, or too complex, or too expensive but the long-term benefits of regular upstreaming truly outpass these constraints especially it you have the right methods. In this presentation Neil will elaborate on this question. Neil will then expose the various challenges about code upstreaming, like time constraints, copyright issues and the community aspect of the work. For example, vendor GPL code is generally lying on an obscure github repo, or in a hardly reachable tarball. In parallel, Neil will present practical tips to easier your day to day upstream work and explicit this simple rule : the fastest the maximum patches are upstreamed, the less work you'll have to actually maintain the port in the future.