[kwlug-disc] How Canonical makes money ...

[Chris Frey]

On Sun, May 16, 2010 at 01:27:55AM -0400, Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:
> Do you think that abandoning the kernel numbering "even is stable, odd is
> development" contributes to that?
> 
> I never liked that new stuff will always be tacked on to the 2.6.whatever.

Yeah, I didn't like that either, but I've gotten used to it.
And I don't see those big changes anymore like I used to.  I still remember
manually following a HOWTO on upgrading my libc and moving from a.out
to ELF.  Such low level changes don't happen anymore in the kernel,
so the big leaps are not necessary.

The userspace API is really quite stable.  File I/O, libc, etc.
It's the guts of the kernel that is continually changing like lava
in a volcano :-)  And driver writers taste that.


> That refactoring and breaking the API makes moving modules and themes
> from one version to the next a pain, but by and large we think the lack of
> compatibility layers and legacy cruft accumulating from earlier releases
> is a worthy compromise.

I agree... it's a worthy compromise in the kernel too, I think.
But vendors are used to the OS manufacturer taking great pains to
be backward compatible.  Windows has some truly impressive backward
compatibility.

- Chris