Mike Hearn mike@theoretic.com writes:
b) Notify the Wine community of what the patches do/are but keep their contents secret. Pros: Less chance of duplication, Cons: if people need the patch, knowing I have one won't be much use and it'd be hard to notify people without spamming the mailing list. Not enough people monitor bugzilla for me to be sure it'd work.
Don't do that. Patches that aren't released under a free license should be treated as if they didn't exist; we don't want to discourage people from working on something just because someone has a patch that may or may not be released at some indeterminate point in the future.
This may cause some duplication, but it's always better to have two implementations of something than to risk having none at all if it turns out that you can't release the patch in the end.
Also make sure that you get the customer's agreement before releasing anything; most likely if you are doing work for hire they own the copyright and you can't release it without their permission (of course once they distribute the result it has to be LGPL, but they don't necessarily want to distribute it).