Post #1890211
2026-04-26 08:51 UTC
@klausman @kernellogger There is no free lunch, so people who have "genuine need" of particular drivers need to pay with their testing of new kernel releases (LKML does not matter here - no one needs to read it). This applies to individual users or companies using some very old LTS. If they ever tested only their old LTS (imagine v4.4 with stunning 300 stable releases for 6 years of official support!), never moved their kernel for their products to any newer LTS, not even imagining testing newer standard release, what do they expect?
That some maintainers will do the work for them for free?
Free Software is free as in freedom of usage, not free of the effort. I think many forgot that and assume Linux comes for them for free as in free beer, thus they have no obligations and can be just consumers of it.
Replies (1)
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@uecker@mastodon.social 2026-04-26 09:01
@krzk @kernellogger @klausman While people should not expect free lunch, I think this is too simple. The cost depends on other upstream activities. For example, if code is changed because there is a 0.5% gain for some hyperscaler, this means people who were already happy about how things are need to test. One can argue that who pays the main contributors can decide, but one should acknowledge that Linux traditionally also served other communities which may not be able to keep up.