svn commit: r48151 - head/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/explaining-bsd

[Warner Losh]

On Fri, Feb 5, 2016 at 2:29 AM, Remko Lodder <remko at freebsd.org> wrote:

>
> > On 04 Feb 2016, at 16:58, Eitan Adler <eadler at freebsd.org> wrote:
> >
> > On 4 February 2016 at 02:36, Remko Lodder <remko at freebsd.org> wrote:
> >>
> >>> On 04 Feb 2016, at 09:05, Eitan Adler <eadler at freebsd.org> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> Author: eadler
> >>> Date: Thu Feb  4 08:05:16 2016
> >>> New Revision: 48151
> >>> URL: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/changeset/doc/48151
> >>>
> >>> Log:
> >>> - there is more than one variant of Linux
> >>> - not all BSDs use svn and it isn't core to the BSD model
> >>
> >> That is incorrect, there is one linux kernel, but there are multiple
> distributions.
> >
> > There are many variants of the Linux kernel.  Almost no one uses
> > Linus's tree directly.
>
> There is one linux, and many distributions.
>

It's all a matter of semantics. You both are right, and also you are both
wrong.
The 'there's one Linux' mantra has been a mix of both marketing hype and
reality. Kinda. It is true there's one mainline kernel that most people
fork from.
However, the number of people that actually run that kernel stock, without
mods, is tiny. Every distribution flavors the kernel, often extensively, as
well
as other parts of the system. These differences can be quite extensive when
you look at it, and it is rare that all the changes make it back into the
mainline
kernel, though sometimes echos of them do (there's many SoCs that have
forked kernels that never get their diffs back into kernel.org: god help
you if
you have to run on multiple of these from different vendors on a unified
kernel
version). So Linux really is a thick bush of somewhat similar code bases
rather
than a single code base that works everywhere.

I think from a marketing perspective, we should play these difficulties up
and
not surrender the marketing point. But that's just me.

Warner