Widely ported, sure.

Widely ported, sure.

Posted Dec 30, 2005 22:44 UTC (Fri) by busterb (subscriber, #560)
In reply to: Widely ported, sure. by ncm
Parent article: NetBSD 3.0

I do think that it is possible to accurately know how many systems Linux or NetBSD has been ported to because a lot of work never gets put into the mainline, regardless of license.

Support for many embedded systems comes in the form of an out-of-tree patch, either from a vendor's board support package or some internal branch. Many of these will never make it into the mainline kernel due to lack of interest, low code quality, or both.

Wasabi Systems for instance probably has support for a lot of hardware not supported by NetBSD proper. MontaVista makes a lot of its work public, but not all; otherwise, why buy MontaVista Linux? Neither the GPL nor BSD licenses require the source to be distributed back to the originator, nor do they require any effort to get patches rolled into the mainline. I could easily take the kernel patches from several vendor-supplied board support packages that I am working with and post them on LKM (the're GPL-code derivative), but I really have no motivation to get the drivers and such up to proper Linux standards nor to support them. If I distribute a product with this code, I only have to supply the code to customers.

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