

On the scalability of Linus - jpablo
http://lwn.net/Articles/393694/

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avar
The problem is that ARM is a licensable architecture, so there are lots of
minor variations in sub-architectures.

The companies maintaining these have no motivation to consider the problem of
maintaining /all/ of these, they're happy to basically copy/paste some other
code until their CPU work.

Linus is saying that that's not going to work anymore, that they're going to
have to come up with a way to consolidate their codebases.

~~~
_delirium
That's probably the right solution, but it's a hard problem. NetBSD is
probably the kernel that goes to the most effort to make clean, modular,
orthogonal abstractions across hardware families and components, but it took
them a lot of design effort up front, and continual policing of the
abstraction boundaries and debugging of weird variants to make things actually
work that way.

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WilliamLP
I don't think it's any coincidence at all that the most successful open source
effort ever is the same one where there is the greatest force of personality
in charge, who insists on maintaining top-down control. I'm not convinced that
lateral organization between developers can ever work very well.

~~~
sgift
Besides your hyperbole "most successful" I point to FreeBSD for a quite
successful open source project which is not controlled top-down by one person.
Apache httpd (or other apache projects) also come to mind.

~~~
jpablo
While I think FreeBSD has created a great piece of software I don't think you
can say that they are as successful as Linux.

~~~
kunley
While the FreeBSD people didn't have their momentum to market themselves in a
way Linux community had, they still manage to produce better system.

The other thing is that most people, even who consider themselves OS hackers,
don't need such sophisticated and cohesive system. Or they don't have an
opportunity to really dive in to see the difference.

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milesf
People use Linus' kernel version because of his track record. Don't like it?
Fork it.

The day Linus starts failing miserably is the day another mainline will
emerge, and everyone will switch to that. Nothing here to worry about.

~~~
blueberry
There might be comparable forks to Linux out there right now. Does anyone
switch? No. Linux is the windows of Unices. You can't dethrone it just by
coming up with a better fork.

~~~
derefr
There's a difference between being slightly better than something that's still
satisfactory, and being good in comparison to something that's no longer
satisfactory. Look at X11: everyone used XFree86, even though forks were
possible— _until_ they decided to go in a direction people didn't like. Then
people started using X.Org pretty damned fast.

~~~
blueberry
While I agree with what you are saying, your analogy is not completely
accurate. Switching GUI is nowhere near switching the kernel in terms of risk
and the hassle that might come with the change. The main reasons for inertia
are the linux servers and the development stack that's built on top of linux
servers. Most deployed Linuces have neither X.Org nor XFree86 installed on
them.

~~~
nzmsv
The kernel is already evolving constantly, and a major version upgrade has to
be thoroughly tested before rolling it out on a production system. A fork
won't be that different - if Linus switches the license tomorrow, most kernel
devs will just move to the forked codebase.

~~~
avar
A license change is a bad example. Nobody can switch the license for Linux. It
has always been GPLv2-only, you'd need the approval of all contributors to the
kernel to switch.

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albertzeyer
Of course there is also a limit in our time about how much the kernel
community can grow.

That limit probably increases somewhat asymptotically to the human population.
The actual kernel community size will probably increase slower, though. I
think that increase is lower than the increase of how development in IT will
simplify things.

I.e., if my assumption stays true, there wont be any problem.

------
moolave
Like Windows, Facebook, and others; it is the platform that makes Linux
scalable. With that being, we'd like to create a platform for other developers
to collaborate and develop their own.

