[alexgartrell]

First, it’s reeaallllyyyy expensive to invest enough in an open source project that you have a reasonable chance of steering it.

Second, even if you do the first, the whole thing gets screwed up again when you start trying to introduce vendor code into the mix. Generally, no one upstream gives a crap that you have super compelling business reasons to compromise on code quality (or even trivial things like how code is committed: tarballs vs good git hygiene), and vendors sometimes compromise a lot.

So it’s not surprising that sometimes groups choose to do the expedient thing to get something to market instead of doing things “the right way.” In a lot of respects, the original Android did this with Linux.

Competition is good.

[klodolph]

> In a lot of respects, the original Android did this with Linux.

Android vendors keep doing this over and over again with Linux, which explains why so many phones are stuck on old versions of Android.

[ssakamoto]

Imagine if there were multiple incompatible and competing linux kernels. What we have now is AMD/MS/Apple etc... contributing to the kernel through "vendor code". Imagine if AMD released a AMDLinux and Nvidia had NvidiaLinux.

[alexgartrell]

This already happens, because most (?) people aren’t running vanilla kernels. Many (most?) distros compile their kernels with config options and patches that “make sense to them.” In the most egregious cases, you end up with things like bpf being intentionally broken by default.