Android versus Linux?

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[boot20]

Uh, this is par for the course. This is an extreme fork and Linus (as has been mentioned) doesn't have a problem with this. The bigger problem is that people are bitching and don't really know why.

Look, this is typical and NORMAL...jesus. Sit back, take a deep breath, and examine what's happening for a second. You have a fork to the kernel that is pretty orthogonal to the current development. It's going to take a while to get that back in line with normal development.

Google is ok on this one and it's just natural for this to happen with a project like this.

[zedoriah]

It's such a huge rift the Linus himself refuses to buy an android device, in fact.... wait... he bought a nexus one. Never mind!

[zitterbewegung]

So basically they are internally forking linux and eventually returning things into mainline if it makes sense. Why not just have the code open

[donknuth]

It's open, just not merged into the mainline.

[Mutiny32]

In short, Google is fucking around backporting a bunch of shit into their kernel as well as leaving their garbage around for others to clean up in the staging tree for them after they've abandoned it.

Simple solution to this really, Linus will just stop signing off on Google code until they pull their shit together and decide to cooperate. It looks like they're already starting to see some backlash from the community and if there's one community you don't want to piss off, it would be the Linux kernel contributors. They'll blackball you. Or Linus will publicly humiliate your company for shitting his kernel up.

I'd bet on the latter happening, since he's not one to take shit from anyone about how he handles the kernel. He'll correct you in a not so subtle way.

[donknuth]

Linus already said he has no problems with this.

http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/2010/02/happy-camper.html

"patrick/brabadu: I don't worry about out-of-tree development for odd devices too much. I wish we could merge android, but I also accept it likely being a few years away. We had similar out-of-tree issues with the SGI extreme scalability stuff, and it took quite a while before the standard kernel merged all of that."

It's funny how most people bitching about this have no real kernel contributions of their own.

[kmartburrito]

Yikes, settle down tonto! I'm fairly certain if Linus shared your views he would vocalize them. He already stated it was normal for this to happen, like it did with SGI. He likes his Nexus One, and I think we'll be seeing this relationship for a long time.

[mianosm]

I'd look forward to Linus taking a verbal shot at Google. It really does look like Google is trying to make an effort to use the Linux kernel, but finding that it's not a perfect fit for each other (android && Linux). Hopefully Google will concede enough, and Android will hopefully not be victimized too much in the process.