Linux Kernel Development

D

Deleted member 111282

Guest
While I'm not going to deny the achievements the Linux Foundation has made for Linux itself in the last several years (as there has been plenty of them), I will agree that it does have some guilt of being a corporate shill (and it has noted this criticism on occasion). To be fair, anyone, including corporations, has the right to use Linux however they choose (as that's the philosophy of FOSS), but many people in the community will agree the Foundation puts corporate interests above community ones, mainly because money talks. That being said, I recently began to wonder what would happen to the kernel if the foundation, or any of it's corporate sponsors, eventually went defunct. We've seen a number of controversies within the Foundation itself and it's sponsors, and it's only a matter of time before they all collapse in on themselves because of that. If that happens, would a new foundation spring up in it's place (and be one that's truly community-oriented)? Would Tovalds decide each distro development team has to designate a subsection of their developers to work on the kernel, and then have them collaborate with other ones? Would the kernel end up being forked and act as a replacement for the original? Or would each distro decide to become similar to BSD by having both its own OS and kernel?
 
Last edited by a moderator:


Any of the above is possible. Enjoy what we have while we have it.
Worst comes to the worst, groups break up, new ones spring up in their ashes, we keep a copy of IOS handy, its free to use on the computing device it comes on, it comes installed on the mac subsystem. Windows is another alternative, we will not perish if Linux Kernel team implode or explode.
 
Foundations need money to run. Giving some love to corporate interests may be a requirement for the foundations to survive.

I've pondered what would happen if Torvalds left (natually or unnaturally) Linux. It's kind of a scary thought. But he's not a singular decision maker in his foundation. And he's also not contributing much code to the kernel these days. He's pretty much moved on to administrative (clerical) duties.

The *idea* of Open Source is what truly needs to survive. More so than any foundation, or even GNU/Linux OS itself. When the idea survives, then we will always be able to create and share knowledge. And I'm sure we would find a way.

People who actually contribute to the Kernel are gods amongst gods amongst gods. Rifling through millions of lines of code to maintain and test such a goliath. They are very much appreciated.
 
If for reason the Linux Kernel team fall apart, the above would make a good home for those with the required skills.

What about android, is that based on a Kernel that is related to the mainline Kernel, or is it being maintained by google.

I personally can see Linux becoming like BSD instead because then there's no single point of failure (whether it'd be the kernel team falling apart, these idiotic political activists (who don't even care about technology, btw) invading the Linux Foundation and corrupting it with their own agendas, or some hacker implanting malicious code into the kernel itself (which has happened a few times)). One of the downsides of that happening is the lesser-known distros will struggle with getting 3rd party support, much like FreeBSD having the most support out of all of them.

Android is in fact a fork of the kernel, but its mostly maintained by Google. There are various deGoogled versions of it, but most of them (aside from LineageOS, and that's being generous) haven't gained much traction, mostly because of Google's dominance in the phone market. After completing some research on occasion, non-smartphones are slowly starting to make a comeback, so maybe after they've gained more steady traction in the market, Google and Apple's dominance will gradually recede.
 
Last edited by a moderator:

Members online


Top