Re:BSD = fragmented, Linux = unified (Score 1)

> What concerns me with BSD (not particularly
> FreeBSD) is that each distro forks the kernel
> and maintains only that fork. This is not unity.
In more than ten years of free BSDs this has actually happened only two times:

• The NetBSD -> OpenBSD fork
  That one basically happened, because the NetBSD people weren't very comfortable with the way Theo dealt with the users.
• The FreeBSD -> Dragonfly fork
  This is because, Mathew Dillon was not agreeing to the new roadmap for the FreeBSD 5 line and wanted to go a different way. Why should anybody try to stop him?

All BSDs still share a lot of common ground and code and idea exchanges happen:

NetBSD and OpenBSD have the same VM Subsystem (UVM), UFS2 changes have been ported from FreeBSD to NetBSD, rcorder(8) made its way into FreeBSD from NetBSD, OpenSSH is used almost everywhere and so on.

Dragonfly -- e.g. is a test baloon -- try out something new, without affecting, what's already working. To tell the truth, I think this is the best scientific way of doing something.

Why are there no Linux forks? I don't know, but there are many reasons that there should, I can only speculate, why there aren't any:

• Forking is uncool, it means to have an opinion, that is against the masses of other developers. And you know that some Linux developers aren't the nicest people around, when you criticize their work
• Forking is a major hazzle: The development is decentralized, coordinating common subsystems and other parts of two different, but similar systems would be a hazzle. Besides: You're out of the mainstream's "Linux is the next best thing(tm)" hype and that does not really comply with typical Linux developer philosophy, which is rather "do what's needed, so that the thing works" then "do what's probably right"

Besides, one must tell, that there are forks: SuSE ships an maintains it's own kernel, so does Redhat and heaven knows how many companies, that distribute an embedded version of Linux somewhere.

But I do not really want to know, how many killed by (some stupid) policy like the Philips-USB-CAM support. How many drivers are out there, that worked with Linux 2.2 but won't any more, because something has changed in the vanilla kernel, but the driver never make in in there, so it just died? I really don't want to know ...