Dear Jared,
In message 4912868E.2080002@genesysdesign.com.au you wrote:
We are a consulting firm that has produced a product for a client which contains at Atmel AT91SAM9263 running linux. I have registed a machine type at kernel.org and have ported both u-boot and the kernel to it. I have created patches to add this support against u-boot HEAD. Is it standard practice to submit the patches to u-boot or is it preferred that I only make them available to the client?
U-Boot is Free Software, and it is basicly up to you (and/or your client) to decide what you do with the port (of course your client has to make the source code available to his customers as required by the GPL, but that's a different story).
If you want to do your client a favor (i. e. if you are looking for a long-term relationship to that client) then you should submit your patches and try to get these merged into mainline. Otherwise you will find that your port is very quickly (within few weeks) so different from the mainline version, that attempts to update it later (for example to benefit from recent fixes or additions in mainline) will require a *substancial* amount of work.
Best regards,
Wolfgang Denk