Closed source modules will be banned from kernel?

[Rahul Sundaram]

John Burton wrote:
> Hmmm... do "Open Source" modules have the same problem?  Do these 
> "wholesale gratuitous changes" occur during minor revision changes or 
> major version changes? Major version changes in most software change the 
> API, while minor revisions do not. Are the kernel modules not consistent 
> with this?

The kernel has a stable user space API and volatile in-kernel modules 
interfaces API. The reasons are outlined in

http://lxr.linux.no/linux/Documentation/stable_api_nonsense.txt

For free and open source code (including but not limited to driver 
modules) that is included within the upstream kernel, this presents no 
problems since whenever API changes occur, whoever is making the API 
change can go ahead and fix all the consumers of the API.

Linux kernel doesn't follow the traditional stable vs unstable tree 
development model in recent 2.6 kernel releases. Discussions on the 
reason for the change are outlined in many places including

http://lwn.net/Articles/94386/

Rahul