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
They can forbid you to work on opensource stuff while being in free time? I mean, I understand that you are not allowed to generate open code that utilises private know how of the company you work for. But not working on Linux in free time seems very strange to me 😮
Edit: deleted wrong “Edit:”
I’m not saying you’re lying, but you said
do not allow software developers to send a patch or PR to open source projects.
But this sentence in particular was misleading. Maybe you specifically did not have the right to do so, but in the Linux and BSD codebases there are a lot of @microsoft @netflix @oracle contributions, so at least there is someone in those companies authorized to do so
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.
The wrote and released VS Code - a completely opensource development environment. If they wanted to patch Grub I bet they could have found the permissions internally to do that. Microsoft is a lot more open to OSS contributions then they were in the past.
