[kwlug-disc] Google purchases Motorola (Mobile)?

[Chris Irwin]

On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 11:59:00PM -0400, John Johnson wrote:
> On 2011-08-20 23:44, Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:
> >Forking is not always in the best interest of the forker. They
> >take on full responsibility of the fork, such as new features and
> >security updates, the more time passes, the wider the gap, and the
> >more of a burden it becomes, specially with a smaller or no
> >community to contribute.
> 
> I understand that is exactly what has happened in the Linux fork
> that serves as the underpinnings of Android. Some of Google's
> changes were rejected for inclusion in the main trunk with the
> result that Android fork is divergent from the main trunk. Google
> now 'owns' the fork - as well as the Android super-set thereof. And,
> as suggested by Khalid, the fork does not have the support
> community.

On the other hand, I'd consider that a half-fork. At worst, they are
maintaining a bunch of out-of-tree patches. 'git' provides them with a
tool that easily allows them to rebase onto upstream kernels, updating
the patches where necessary. Granted some of those patches are somewhat
invasive and incompatible with other Linux systems.

Xen maintained out-of-tree patches for years until they were recently 
merged.

-- 
Chris Irwin
e:  chris at chrisirwin.ca
w: http://chrisirwin.ca
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