2.4, The Kernel and Forking

darthcamaro writes "We all assume that the kernel is the kernel that is maintained by kernel.org and that Linux won't fork the way UNIX did..right? There's a great story at internetnews.com about the SuSe CTO taking issue with Red Hat backporting features of the 2.6 Kernel into its own version of the 2.4 kernel. "I think it's a mistake, I think it's a big mistake," he said. "It's a big mistake because of one reason, this work is not going to be supported by the open source community because it's not interesting anymore because everyone else is working on 2.6." My read on this is a thinly veiled attack on Red Hat for 'forking' the kernel. The article also give a bit of background on SuSe's recent decision to GPL their setup tool YAST, which they hope other distros will adopt too."

Comments

Vendor adds lots of patches to kernel

[MartinG]

News at 11.

Forget Forking

[Anonymous Coward]

... What happens when the Linux kernel starts spooning? We will never see him again, because he will be spending all his time with his new girlfriend. That is until she kicks him to the curb, and he comes crawling back looking for his old friends again.

You know you have all seen this happen a million times before.

Re:Forget Forking

[Anonymous Coward]

But there is no spoon...

And since there is no spoon:

"Use the forks, Luke!"

Re:Do we need to keep discussing this?

[Phs2501]

The entire concept of a "FORK" requires secret proprietary source code and copyrighted functions and pantented methods.

Actually, the concept of fork(2) really just requires a simple system call. Copy-on-write pages help a lot too, though.

:)

slackware

[gumpish]

"None of the major distributors ship a pure Linus kernel"

actually, slackware does ship vanilla kernel.

In the grandparent's defense, they did say none of the major distributors.

Re:slackware

[w9ofa]

Dude, 1996 called, they want their linux distro back.