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Linkoteca. Linux kernel

Bad News! Windows 10 Will Soon Have a Real Linux Kernel

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The upcoming version of Windows 10 will feature a real Linux kernel in it as part of Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL).

The so-called ‘love for Linux’ seems more like ‘lust for Linux’ to me. The Linux community is behaving like a teen-aged girl madly in love with a brute. Who benefits from this Microsoft-Linux relationship? Clearly, Microsoft has more to gain here. The WSL has the capacity of shrinking (desktop) Linux to a mere desktop app in this partnership.

By bringing Linux kernel to Windows 10 desktop, programmers and software developers will be able to use Linux for setting up programming environments and use tools like Docker for deployment. They won’t have to leave the Windows ecosystem or use a virtual machine or log in to a remote Linux system through Putty or other SSH clients.

In the coming years, a significant population of future generation of programmers won’t even bother to try Linux desktop because they’ll get everything right in their systems that comes pre-installed with Windows.

Linux turns 25, is bigger and more professional than ever

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The most active companies over the 3.19 to 4.7 development cycles in Linux kernel

Just 7.7% of devs are unpaid.

As its importance has grown, development of Linux has steadily shifted from unpaid volunteers to professional developers. The 25th anniversary version of the Linux Kernel Development Report, released by the Linux Foundation today, notes that «the volume of contributions from unpaid developers has been in slow decline for many years. It was 14.6 percent in the 2012 version of this paper, 13.6 percent in 2013, and 11.8 percent in 2014; over the period covered by this report, it has fallen to 7.7 percent. There are many possible reasons for this decline, but, arguably, the most plausible of those is quite simple: Kernel developers are in short supply, so anybody who demonstrates an ability to get code into the mainline tends not to have trouble finding job offers.»

What the data says about how Linux kernel developers collaborate

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replies on the Linux USB mailing list over a two-year period (Oct. 31, 2013 to Oct. 31, 2015)

One of the interesting things about the Linux kernel is that the vast majority of people who contribute to it are employed by companies to do this work; however, most of the academic research on open source software assumes that participants are volunteers, contributing because of some personal need or altruistic motivation. Although this is true for some projects, this assumption just isn’t valid for projects like the Linux kernel.

Many kernel developers also collaborate with their competitors on a regular basis, where they interact with each other as individuals without focusing on the fact that their employers compete with each other.

Paid developers power the Linux kernel

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Contrary to open-source folklore, it is mostly paid developers who are building the Linux kernel.

Kernel development follows a time-based release model with a new release occurring every two to three months. This is designed to help speed the development for all Linux distributions so that each one doesn’t need to make kernel-specific updates or changes. More than 6,100 individual developers from more 600 different companies have contributed to the kernel since 2005, according the report.

Google wants to unfork Android back to the Linux kernel

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GOOGLE HAS SAID it wants to bring Android into line with the main Linux kernel.

Although Android already works on a Linux kernel, it’s been so heavily modified over the years, it’s almost unrecognisable, and certainly no longer compatible with the main Linux operating system.

it would mean that both Android and Linux would benefit from the advances we’ve seen in both since the two parted company, meaning more advanced Linux powered computers, and more agile Android builds.