An Interview With Linus Torvalds: Linux and Git (Tag1)

An Interview With Linus Torvalds: Linux and Git (Tag1)

Posted Apr 30, 2021 22:38 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75)
In reply to: An Interview With Linus Torvalds: Linux and Git (Tag1) by excors
Parent article: An Interview With Linus Torvalds: Linux and Git (Tag1)

and that doesn't really happen with the mobile device forks (unless you choose to define "good parts" in a way that precisely excludes all the work done in those forks).

That's not necessarily a bad definition. The stuff that is most important to merge back are parts that are useful outside the fork, either because they touch some part of the core kernel or because they're drivers for hardware that exists outside the fork. For a lot of SOC systems, that doesn't amount to much. Most of what they're changing is hardware specific, and in many cases the hardware isn't used outside the one project.

It would be better for users if the manufacturer merged the hardware support back to mainline, since it would give the systems a prayer of being supported when the manufacturer gave up on them, but for fairly obvious reasons the manufacturers aren't too keen on spending the effort. In theory, the GPL could help out there, since it would give motivated users access to the code for their system, which they could theoretically merge themselves. In practice, it's a rare system that has enough motivated and technically competent users to make it happen.

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