November 23rd, 2004
Is a fork inevitable?
Regular readers of this space may remember Shelley Powers writing about doing a "fork" of Wordpress (which runs this blog) as part of her piece, No Ghost in the Machine.
Forks happen all the time, she noted. " I can grab a snapshot of the code and go my own direction, maintaining my own version of the code," she wrote.
But what if Linux itself forked? What if there were two, increasingly incompatibleversions of the Linux kernel?
Well, it may be about to happen. In an otherwise-upbeat talkat the SDForumlast week, lead maintainer Andrew Morton of OSDL said a fork in the road may indeed be coming for Version 2.7 of the kernel.
Morton said there are some folks with big patch sets the kernel just can’t accomodate, because the changes would apply to a small subset of total Linux shops.
Naturally, this has some observers wondering if the sky is falling, comparing Linux to the Unix versions of the 1980s which couldn’t get out of one anothers’ way in the marketplace due to incompatibility. Hang together or Microsoft will hang us all separately.
But is that really the case? If a few people need some specific functions that are a subset of the total, can’t they have them without tearing down the whole tower of Babel?
Or is the truth closer to that of my own favorite Yogi, Berra, who said "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." Something to consider while carving your Thanksgiving turkey.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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