Microsoft's aggressive defense of its intellectual property, which includes claims that Linux violates a number of its patents, is nothing more than 'a marketing thing', according to Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel. "They have been sued for patents by other people, but I don't think they've - not that I've gone through any huge amount of law cases - but I don't think they've generally used patents as a weapon," Torvalds said. "But they're perfectly happy to use anything at all as fear, uncertainty and doubt in the marketplace, and patents is just one thing where they say, 'Hey, isn't this convenient? We can use this as a PR force'."
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Patents may be the most interesting but not the the only subject in the interview.
For example, Torvalds encourages experimenting, and development of various kernel trees, and trying new things in general. He says: "One of the problems is we have people who have such high criteria for what is acceptable or not that it scares away people who want to do new code and do new experiments. We mustn't set the bar that high. New code, new drivers, there will be problems and I'd rather take them and then improve them."
I hope that both new developers and old/ex kernel developers like Con Kolivas who may have given up at least temporarily could see that as a positive sign that there's still room and need for them too in the kernel development.
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"One of the problems is we have people who have such high criteria for what is acceptable or not that it scares away people who want to do new code and do new experiments. We mustn't set the bar that high. New code, new drivers, there will be problems and I'd rather take them and then improve them."
Why not use similar to FreeBSD development model when one branch is "bleeding edge" aka CURRENT aka 7 (or even 8 now) and STABLE aka 6.x? All goodies that is tested enough and works well in CURRENT is back-ported to STABLE later.
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There is, sort of, in -mm. This is more or less the UNSTABLE branch, since it contains patches, improvements and features that the devs hope will make it into mainline and it's regularly updated against Linus' current tree, including the -rcs.
The bigger problem is that the pool of users willing to run non-mainline kernels, and help with error-reporting etc., let alone code patching, is relatively slim.