So they were trying to patch systems that use GRUB for Windows-only installs? What a load of BS. Why would anybody install GRUB to boot only Windows with that? Or am I overlooking something?
Furthermore, if GRUB has a security issue, they should’ve contributed a patch at the source instead of patching it themselves somehow. I’m a bit stunned at the audacity of touching unmounted filesystems in an OS patch. Good thing Windows still doesn’t include EXT4 and BTRFS drivers because they might start messing with unencrypted Linux system drives at this rate
I agree they should have sent a patch to the grub source, but keep in mind big software companies like microsoft, Verizon, … do not normally allow their product teams to send a patch or PR to open source projects. This is because in their contract it states that all code written on and during company times is owned by the company. This means that it is impossible for them to make a patch or PR because it would conflict with the projects licence and fact its open source.
This changes when the team explicitly works on the foss product/project like the ms wsl team or the team working on linux supporting azure hardware, but that is an exception. I do not believe the microsoft kernel/bootloader team is allowed to send patches to grub.
Its a terrible thing, and it shouldnt be, but thats the fact of the world atm.
This means that it is impossible for them to make a patch or PR because it would conflict with the projects licence and fact its open source.
That’s not how it works. It just means the company owns the code for all intents and purposes, which also means that if they tell you that you can release it under a FOSS license / contribute to someone else’s project, you can absolutely do that (they effectively grant you the license to use “their” code that you wrote under a FOSS license somewhere else).
Not true. A lot of commonly known closed source companies contribute to open source software, including Linux and BSD
And not every team is allowed to do that.
Also, youre telling somebody who has worked with big companies not allowing it in their employer contract that he is lying? Riiiight…
A lot of google devs also are not allowed to do any linux work outside of work without explicit permissions because of all the internal docs, teams and other work being done on linux from within google. Development rights is an absolute mess, legally.
I usually dont care and do what is right, despite what my emploter contract says, but i have gotten in trouble for it
What? Microsoft have written and released and contributed to many open source projects - they created vscode for one. They are even one of the top contributors to the Linux kernel.
Yes, but not all devs within microsoft are allowed to work on non-ms foss projects. I assume wsl devs are allowed to send stuff to linux but visual studio devs probably are not.
What is that latter fallback called? I set up my boot manually using an EFI stub last time I installed arch but wasn’t aware of any fallback bootloader
