Pray tell, whenever there’s a new release of the kernel, what do these forks do?
Point being nobody has hard forked the kernel and seen any success, its just not possible to keep up. There is still undoubtedly a hard dependency on the kernel by lots of software, just as lots of operating systems and software rely on systemd. In a world where these things were closed source, dependence is dangerous, but because they’re open source and so heavily depended on by the open source community, more people using it makes it better in much the same way it does for Linux.
Actually there is not much reliance on the mainstream kernel. Forks work just fine.
Pray tell, whenever there’s a new release of the kernel, what do these forks do? Point being nobody has hard forked the kernel and seen any success, its just not possible to keep up. There is still undoubtedly a hard dependency on the kernel by lots of software, just as lots of operating systems and software rely on systemd. In a world where these things were closed source, dependence is dangerous, but because they’re open source and so heavily depended on by the open source community, more people using it makes it better in much the same way it does for Linux.
The kernel is now geopolitical. That says it all.