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

[John Johnson]

On 2011-08-21 00:15, Chris Irwin wrote:
> 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
There is more to this part of this story here: 
http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/android-kernel-problems.html
And its much more than I can digest for this blog.
Except to summarize that it is a mess.

jsquared