Greg Kroah-Hartman: Android and the Linux kernel community

Hm, having read your blog article (and not the rest, in particular not any other details on the earlier discussions of API changes), and also having read Chris DB's comment further below, I have to say that Google perhaps has a point.

... with an investment as large as Google's in Android, they have to be allowed to make and retain their own design decisions, at least for their own use.

For example, the "Android userspace logic" would seem a difficult thing to legislate for anyone but Google, unless the necessary changes are minor. Likewise, if they find a new lock type necessary for their work, it would seem a tall order to have them take it out now (and deal with the resulting breakage on their users' phone ...)

So is there really no compromise possible in another way? (for example - only drivers needed for Android get to use the Android-specific infrastructure?) That at least would keep the overall code base closer to the mainline than with an outright fork ... and well, perhaps some day someone else actually finds that framebuffer infrastructure unexpectedly helpful after all?)