Three Decades in Kernelland
summary
Kernel size reaches 40 million lines of code and development stays monotonic through crashes, lawsuits, and a pandemic; the project moves from BitKeeper → git after a license pull, proving tools and licenses matter; the release model becomes a reliable 9–10 week merge-window cycle with about 4–5,000 active developers and ~80,000 commits a year; long projects like real-time preemption take ~20 years to land, and GPL plus upstream-first policies keep the code unified and reusable.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (10)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:44Linux as hobbyist project
- 4:13Netscape’s open source move
- 9:08Lessons from Linux’s model
- 14:46Linux’s independence
- 20:26Legal battles and resistance
- 25:44BitKeeper crisis and Git
- 28:12New kernel development model
- 33:32Linux’s dominance and challenges
- 37:04Q&A
