[Info-vax] RMS intro

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

On Wed, 03 Jan 2024 08:54:23 +0000, Single Stage to Orbit wrote:

> On Wed, 2024-01-03 at 02:46 +0000, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> At the same time, Linux had also rewritten its USB stack three times.
>> But it had the luxury of starting pretty much from scratch each time,
>> without having to carry around a lot of legacy baggage, because all the
>> drivers included in the Linux kernel source tree could be updated at
>> the same time.
> 
> That's true but it is a source of considerable pain for commercial
> products such as VMware, VirtualBox, ZFS and others. They all have to
> devote substantial engineering resources to release updates for every
> kernel release.

The usual recommendation is that they should contribute the necessary 
drivers to the mainline Linux kernel--along with a commitment to keep 
maintaining them.

Microsoft discovered this the hard way, when it got some Hyper-V drivers 
accepted into the kernel, and then forgot about the part that every piece 
of code in the kernel has to have a responsive maintainer. It took the 
threat of the code being dropped from the kernel to make them sit up and 
take notice.