It doesn't seem so.
In the last century the people in charge were visible. One might actually have sent them an e-mail (and might even have got an answer), but I never dared, because they were so great in skill, they were just gods.
Now look how it is today, just two recent events:
Item: The mailinglists suddenly show strange failures, and slowly it figures that the software has entirely been replaced, in the course of a clandestine change. Nobody knows anything about it except hearsay or interpretation of the error messages.
Item: Somebody here asks if the spectre stuff is implemented at all, and inhowfar. Nicely done! Finally, somebody dares to ask! And then - mobody has solid data, it is peacemeal all over, if existent at all.
I for my part have a setting that I have collected from looking into the sources, which is "
hw.ibrs_disable=0 hw.spec_store_bypass_disable=2 hw.mds_disable=3" - and that may or may not be correct and may or may not be sufficient, I don't know (but it slows bhyve by more than half). And then I don't know if I still need these when compiling with RETPOLINE, or if I should compile Kernel or world or both with retpoline, or whatever. And I think with an issue that was media coverage all over at the time, this is quite poor.Some insiders somewhere would have the information, but we, the users, the inferiors, are out of the loop and can resort to spending hours reading the code and trying to understand what it actually does.
I won't call this collaboration.
Not to mention the overwhelming buerocracy that has been built up in between. As mentioned, in the old times the gods were visible, and if you actually would have an improvement, you would just have talked to them (or they would have talked in the railway about their personal backdoors, which every developer had, and which was just fine).
Today nobody is visible, and it's a vast machinery. If you want to fix something, you have to provide tests for it (strangely, the original bug didn't need to be tested), you need to provide sponsors that would approve the fix, and so on.
And all over this all is the great Google code of conduct, which says that you must never say anything negative: Brokenness must not be criticised, flaws not be mentioned, and defects accepted - in fact, brokenness, flaws and defects are probably forbidden words because somebody could have their feelings hurt from them.
No problem with that. It is intended that they steal it. Then, when their crap malfunctions, I can simply look into the Berkeley sources to see what is going wrong. (Done this, it works.)
