The Future Of The 2.0 Linux Kernel

An Anonymous Reader writes: "The first 2.0 stable kernel was released over six years ago, in June of 1996. It was followed by the 2.2 stable kernel two and a half years later, in January of 1999. The more recent 2.4 stable kernel followed by two years in January of 2001. And the upcoming 2.6 kernel is at least a year off. Through all these years, 2.0 has continued to be maintained, currently up to revision 2.0.39, also released in January of 2001. David Weinehall maintains this kernel, and says, "there _are_ people that still use 2.0 and wouldn't consider an upgrade the next few years, simply because they know that their software/hardware works with 2.0 and have documented all quirks. Upgrading to a newer kernel-series means going through this work again." Read the full story here."

Comments

Um, HUH?

[Wakko Warner]

2.0, a kernel whose last revision was out in January of 2001, "continues to be maintained", according to you?

Something that hasn't been updated in a year and a half counts as "maintained" in your book?

2.0 is pretty much dead.

- A.P.

Re:Consider yourself warned

[flacco]

Which reduces the problem but doesn't negate it. Everyone loves pointing out that anyone can get their hands on the tools necessary to modify open-source software, but they tend to conveniently ignore the fact that not everyone has the programming skills necessary to do so.

The point is not that everyone should maintain their own source code; the point is that if there are enough people interested in keeping it around, it will stay around. You're not at the mercy of your monopolistic vendor's business plans.

Re:Consider yourself warned

[flacco]

If enough people wanted DOS to stick around, they would continue to purchase DOS, etc. etc. Keep in mind, the keyword is _enough_. This is the precise reason you are "at the mercy of [...] vendor's business plans." Because there simply is not enough people purchasing the product to keep it alive.

That's not correct. You're assuming that a vendor's sole interest in a product is whether there is sufficient interest to continue to sell it. A proprietary vendor might want to force you to upgrade, even when your current software environment is exactly what you need.

Now, why would a vendor do something that is against their customer's interest? Easy: they are only interested in their customer's interest as long as that is in *their* interest. For example, let's say an OS vendor has struck a huge deal with entertainment industries to package and deliver their customers via a "secure operating system" that protects digital media. The vendor stands to gain for every customer they get on board, and they *lose* money for every customer who chooses to stay with their current OS.

In monopoly situations, the vendor's old product is actually a *competitor* to its new product. It has to kill off its own older software in order to generate new sales from the same customers.

And why would a customer go along with this coercion? Because they have a large investment in the vendor's platform and the cost to switch is prohibitive. Or, in a monopoly situation, the customer may simply have no other realistic choice.

How could the vendor actually leverage the customer to accede to their desires? By drying up supply; by refusing to burn more copies; witholding support; by fixing prices to make it prohibitive to resist; by no longer fixing security flaws as they're discovered; etc.

Now if we look at the previous poster's comments we see that open source has no remedy whatsoever. If there aren't enough people to warrant keeping a product alive in the marketplace, then why should hackers continue to support their "product" when so few people use it?

You still don't get it - with proprietary software, the vendor can kill a product even if (under normal conditions) there IS enough interest to keep it alive! And the fundamental fact remains: If the source code is available, you CAN actually pay someone to maintain the code. Regardless of whether you or anyone else thinks it's economically viable, any single person to whom it's worth it to do so, can keep the code alive.

There is sort of a mythical maintenance belief going on in the open source crowd. Many seem to believe that just because software is still sitting on a web page or ftp that it is still maintained and updated (or even worthy of a download).

I don't know anyone who believes that. There are scads of projects that are started, abandoned, die deserved deaths and are forgotten. That's certainly not unique to open source software. The difference is - even if you're the *only guy in the world* who wants a copy of that code, you can get it. Software houses with failed closed source projects just don't hand out their failures to the three or four people who might be mildly interested.

Open source software has no greater value than proprietary, if the code is worthless to the user. This is the reason so much is rewritten and so many wheels recreated in open source camp.

It's rewritten if the developer chooses to rewrite. If he wants to borrow someone else's code, he can.

My point of this is: outdated open source is not going to be maintained more than proprietary,

Maybe, maybe not, but with open source, it's the user who decides if it's outdated. Not the vendor.

and in most cases the source code will be worthless to whomever decides to use it.

Huh? If they use it, it's because they find it useful; and if it's useful and they use it, it's not outdated. There's some kind of circular illogic at work here :-)

If only one organization decided to use say, Linux 1.x, then they _could_ maintain it by themselves since no one (I don't think..) maintains that version any longer. But they would have to learn the entire code base and train people to maintain it. In the end, they would have been better off rewritting from scratch--or simply going to the new version.

Again - that may or may not be the case in each particular instance; the main thing is that this is UP TO THE USER.