Forks are out there

Forks are out there

Posted Apr 30, 2008 18:27 UTC (Wed) by man_ls (subscriber, #15091)
In reply to: Yup. The only working model by khim
Parent article: ELC: Morton and Saxena on working with the kernel community

There are a lot of forks that have existed for a long time (-ac, -aa), and some are still out there (-rt, -mm). Apart from explicit forks (called "trees", but diverging in substantial ways) there are distribution kernels, which are often maintained in a parallel state. And we can assume that there are large numbers of private forks all over, either experimental, outdated or temporary, but these are not "significant" as in your message.

If Linus went crazy and stopped merging new drivers while including OS/2 Warp code, people would probably switch to an externally maintained kernel. There must be excellent maintainers out there: every distro has one or more. This is not really a democracy except etymologically: power by the people, for the people.

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