you have a long road to walk, but first you have to leave the house

or why publishing code is STEP ZERO.

If you've been developing code internally for a kernel contribution, you've probably got a lot of reasons not to default to working in the open from the start, you probably don't work for Red Hat or other companies with default to open policies, or perhaps you are scared of the scary kernel community, and want to present a polished gem.

If your company is a pain with legal reviews etc, you have probably spent/wasted months of engineering time on internal reviews and stuff, so think all of this matters later, because why wouldn't it, you just spent (wasted) a lot of time on it, so it must matter.

So you have your polished codebase, why wouldn't those kernel maintainers love to merge it.

Then you publish the source code.

Oh, look you just left your house. The merging of your code is many many miles distant and you just started walking that road, just now, not when you started writing it, not when you started legal review, not when you rewrote it internally the 4th time. You just did it this moment.

You might have to rewrite it externally 6 times, you might never get it merged, it might be something your competitors are also working on, and the kernel maintainers would rather you cooperated with people your management would lose their minds over, that is the kernel development process.

step zero: publish the code. leave the house.

(lately I've been seeing this problem more and more, so I decided to write it up, and it really isn't directed at anyone in particular, I think a lot of vendors are guilty of this).