[zokier]

The author is putting "upstream" on some weird pedestal. The whole point of foss is that any upstreams have very limited privileges compared to downstreams.

> Put in another way, if someone wanted the ability to touch every line of code (in the upstream sense), they would have to be a member of some non trivial amount of communities.

On a typical distro you can just download sources and start hacking, you don't need to be member of any community.

While something like Debian might not be monorepo in the strictest sense, on a conceptual level it is very close. They still have all the sources under their control and are not dependent on anything outside. They are at full liberty to accept or reject any patches regardless of where they come from, from "upstream" or "downstream".

This idea that distros are actually independent full-featured operating systems is an idea that I think is getting forgotten way too often. Distros are (or rather can be) much more than mere repackaging of upstream software.

[moody__]

There is a direct correlation between the amount of power exerted by a project like Debian over an upstream project, and the amount of effort and upkeep required in doing so. I think of this like a sliding scale between shipping things with zero patches and a full on fork. From my understanding distribution patches on top of upstream projects tend to be typically just bug or portability fixes and stop short of adding features. The point I was trying to communicate was that in order to fully interact with the software you either have to be part of the upstream community or essentially fork.

The illustrate how I think Plan 9 is different in this regard. A patch for 9front could include a new feature for our compilers and then also show how useful it is by using it within other parts of our code. In plan 9 you can interact fully with every component.

[BSDobelix]

>The whole point of foss is that any upstreams have very limited privileges compared to downstreams.

I would say introducing a backdoor (xz) without downstream knowing is probably the biggest "privilege" you can have on a system or distribution no?