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How much of the active new feature work for linux happens in a decentralized manner? It seems like a lot of the time it's mostly a single company with a team th
by xxpor 5y ago
How much of the active new feature work for linux happens in a decentralized manner? It seems like a lot of the time it's mostly a single company with a team that's centralized doing the design and coding, and then throwing it over the wall to be reviewed and accepted. That latter half is easy to decentralize, the former not as much.
- mwcampbell 5y agoSure, any given feature may be developed by a single company in a central location. But in aggregate, IIUC, Linux kernel development is decentralized. It's not like a proprietary OS such as Windows, where feature development happens top-down (including the decisions about which features get developed in which office). For example, recall that the hypervisor built into the Linux kernel, KVM, was originally developed and contributed by a little company in Israel (before they got bought by Red Hat). They needed a hypervisor for their desktop virtualization product, so they developed it and contributed it. It wasn't part of any grand top-down strategy for the Linux OS. IMO, that's the key difference.