Re:China: Nvidia Loses Face and a 10 Million PC Order over ...
by dredmorbius on Friday June 22, 2012 @11:44AM
(#4147244)
The ultimate incentive to contribute is that maintaining your own separate fork of development (and backporting/merging upstream changes) eventually becomes too challenging for most organizations.
Now, for an organization operating at China scale, it's possible that a fork could be sustained (so, the "China Syndrome" becomes the "China Fork"), but it's likely still not an optimal strategy, and for mundane areas there could still be substantial leak-back.
So long as changes aren't distributed "outside the organization" (quotes applied in context of defining "organization" relative to a Communist state in which nominally all property is State property), legal GPL code release requirements aren't triggered. Though you and what nuclear-tipped army plan on enforcing that against Beijing is of course another matter.
I wonder how much of that investment finds its way back into upstream projects. Really - I don't know one way or the other, although I have a suspicion that they don't really 'get' openness and so probably violate the GPL.