Enterprise realtime and cooperative development

Having the code open source has prooven this a dozen times in the past.

The major example of this in kernel-land is late in the life of the 2.4  kernel and the 2.5
development series.  In order to meet the demands of customers Redhat and other enterprise-ish
companies backported massive amounts of code from 2.5 series back to the 2.4 and added many of
their own patches. 

That was much more of a fork then any thing else in the kernel's lifespan.

So what ended up happenning is that the kernel developers modified how the development
proccess worked in order to avoid situations like that in the future.


The truth of the matter is that real-time performance is not required for the vast majority of
use cases for Linux. In fact having a strong real-time kernel can actually degrade performance
for server and desktop workloads, as well as the normal break-stuff that large patches tend to
do.

Realtime stuff has been in the works for a long long time and as patches can be applied and
changes made to the kernel they are done. Much of the work is actually  already in the vanilla
kernel and always bits and peices are incorporated into it as time and reality permits. 2.6.23
is much more realtime-ish then something like 2.6.8 in this respect, offering better
performance and desktop response if configured correctly.