[throw0101b]

> What companies have actually found is that collaborating on OSS infrastructure projects is extremely beneficial, essentially outsourcing some of the work to focus more on their unique selling points.

I think there are examples of this in FreeBSD: after a company effectively forked the project, FreeBSD kept rolling forward—with bug fixes, updated drivers, etc. The company(s) had to maintain larger and larger internal diffs to get all of these improvements.

At some point they tended to just start giving back whatever wasn't their secret sauce and keep their own code as self-contained as possible. I think a popular workflow nowadays is to just track -CURRENT [1], and maybe branch when they cut a release of their own product.

[1] https://klarasystems.com/articles/evaluating-freebsd-current...