On Thu, 7 Feb 2002, Ely Levy wrote: > there is no kernel of any OS that I know that only one person decide > usualy there are few people and a voting involved. > not mention that not EVERY patch goes to the that person
1. Linus's linux is just a kernel, not a complete OS (as oppsed to the BSDs . Hurd seems to focus on kernel development and applications porting, and reply on the debian repository) 2. Linus has the final word on what goes into the official kernel tree. But the kernel is distributed under the GPL, and this means that anybody is free to fork it. Practically most linux distros have their own forks, which sometimes include substaintial changes to the linus tree. I avoid getting into more technical arguments. This topic has been discussed in many places lately. BTW: there is a little "non-free" license issue with BitKeeper. From what I understand, the license of BitKeeper is basicaly a free license, but requires that you preserve one feature: logging to a certain main reposirtory. I wasn't able to figure out what happens if your system is not connected to the internet (or, OTOH, if it is maliciously tricked to believe that this main server is unavailable). Anyway, kernel people use it, so people probably don't care. For more information: http://lwn.net/1999/features/BitKeeper.php3 http://www.bitkeeper.com/Sales.Licensing.Overview.html -- Tzafrir Cohen /"\ mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] \ / ASCII Ribbon Campaign Taub 229, 972-4-829-3942, X Against HTML Mail http://www.technion.ac.il/~tzafrir / \ ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
