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Those millions of sub-100Mb network devices aren't pushing Linux forward though. Sure, they're using Linux, but they're not the ones pushing it forward. It's co

• acdha 11y ago
  You mean “pushing it forward in this particular direction”. Again, it's great to have people working on this and better if the companies using Linux support developers working on the problem but it's only a deal-breaker for a much smaller number of people. Just to use an example which you see a lot today: how many of the developers jumping on Docker care that much about network performance at this level? I would argue that continued development of the container system has done more to boost Linux usage than low-level networking performance, even though both are entirely legitimate and worthwhile concerns worth developer sponsorship. (ZFS has pulled in the opposite direction for people who care about storage) From the other direction, imagine if *BSD had gotten serious about package management by the mid-to-late 90s when it was obvious how much better the experience was on Debian so that a generation of developers wasn't trained to favor Linux to avoid getting sucked into dependency management. That doesn't have anything to do with the kernel but it mattered more for many, many people. This would have been really interesting if kfreebsd had hit critical mass and made the cost of switching that much lower.