>>Sure. Being able is not the same as wanting to. Not being able precludes wanting to or not.
>
>Says you. If you don't want to (which is 99.9% of everyone I know, even you), does it even matter if you can?
>

Mike,
Way back in my IBM mainframe proprietary code days IBM did supply the source code. I believe that this was done largely for defensive purposes - if worse came to worst you could always fix it yourself.
Usually, we could wait for an official fix (and new source) when we encountered a problem.
But there were always some that needed fixing NOW and some more (changes) that could yield big dividends in operational or performance benefits. For these we went ahead and revised the code ourselves. I guess I did over a hundred of these myself and there were always 6 or more of us doing similar work. [of course we always did so reluctantly, because we now had to keep track of all of the revised code and either re-do it (if necessary, which was less than half the time) or remove it if the problem/enhancement had been 'fixed']

We never really "wanted to" revise their code. But we did, and we wouldn't have been able to do so without the source being available.

For what it's worth, I still think that the kind of situations I describe above will prove to be the primary source of useful revisions to Linux software. We used to offer our 'enhancement changes' to anyone who wanted them and took many from others as well.



SNIP