> How did Linus not go on a rampage after breaking userspace for an entire year? Linus' commandment about not breaking userspace is frequently misunderstood. H

> How did Linus not go on a rampage after breaking userspace for an entire year? Linus' commandment about not breaking userspace is frequently misunderstood. He wants to ensure that user-space /programs/ do not break (even if they rely on buggy behavior that made it into a release), not that the /user/ will never see any breakage of the system whatsoever, which is of course an impossible goal. Device drivers and filesystems are firmly system-level stuff, bugs and backwards-incompatible changes in those areas are regrettable but happen all the same.