> Linux, with has a viral license which essentially forces people to work on the same code base If this were so, my life would be so much easier. Maybe things

> Linux, with has a viral license which essentially forces people to work on the same code base If this were so, my life would be so much easier. Maybe things are like this on higher-end servers, in DevOps and so on, but the other side of Linux deployment -- in embedded systems, consumer hardware, various gizmos, phones and so on -- it's very much not true. Virtually no device that's actually being sold somewhere runs a vanilla Linux kernel when you take it off the shelf. Companies comply with GPL technically -- they publish their changes and they'll even mail you the CD if you ask nicely -- but there's no community work of any kind, really. Sometimes you'll have manufacturers working with funky hardware from obscure companies that never bothered to update their drivers past 2.6.32 (or, best case scenario, 3.2) and the forward-porting dance begins -- that is, if you're lucky and the driver isn't a binary blob. Sometimes the opposite happens -- you're working with shiny new stuff but a Really Smart Manager heard that older kernels are more stable and now the backporting from 4.10 to 3.16 dance begins. The "same codebase" thing is pretty much just a distant dream now -- and you don't want to see most of the codebases out there. Granted, there is a common(-ish) core -- the differences are not on the magnitude of FreeBSD vs. OpenBSD (different vmm systems etc.), but IRL, there's rarely a "single" Linux. Edit: oh, and don't even get me started on all the innuvashon that happens in the layers above the kernel.