strong BSD vs System V split. That's pretty much gone away. There's still

detail but most of the annoying one's are disappearing really fast because

most distributions don't want to annoy users either. It's bad for

business. So the biggest differences these days tend to be visual

differences, like how it installs and things like that and what market

they are going after which implies what kind of stuff they install by

default. I certainly don't have any trouble at all searching for files.

Kernel 2.4 has been delayed a lot. What's the current status (as of

August 2000)?

I'm actually fairly happy about it right now. I'm not so worried about

technology. What used to worry me like a month ago was the dynamics of how

the development happens and one of the problems was that Alan Cox, who has

kind of always been the maintainer of the stable tree, he always takes

over when I go to the development version, was too busy doing the previous

stable tree 2.2. So he hadn't had the time to catch up to 2.4 and that

basically left a vacuum. I've always had a person who keeps track of the

new soon to be stable release so he can maintain it. A month ago I didn't

have, what shall we call it, my second-in-command. That was not so much a

technical problem as a purely logistical problem. For me there was nobody

keeping track of issues and we fixed that just three weeks ago. Basically

I wanted to have somebody I could trust, that I had been working with for

a long time so that I know him and I know when I should ignore him and

when I shouldn't. As long as Alan is not available, the guy who is taking

over is Ted T'so. He was like the first person to use Linux in the

US, so he's a really old timer. Right now he is with VA Linux but every

Linux developer is working for some Linux company except for me, so that

probably doesn't mean that much.

What was the problem?

The problem is that I really enjoy the development process which is why

I'm always on the development kernels. I'm not really the kind of guy who

is good at maintenance. Problem is that when you're getting ready for a

new release, you have to get down into maintenance mode. I need somebody

to keep me on the straight and narrow and I didn't have somebody to keep

me on the straight and arrow because Alan Cox was busy. It's purely a

psychological one. The only real problem was that I was allowing patches