Making separate but critical points about the path of the Linux kernel, the maintainer of the kernel on Monday stressed there is no need to worry about forking and not to expect a move to the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3. Speaking at the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco, Andrew Morton, who maintains the Linux 2.6 kernel for the Linux Foundation, also was critical of Sun Microsystems. Sun, he said, has fragmented the non-Windows operating system world with OpenSolaris, which is an open source version of Solaris that rivals Linux.
Acknowledging that fears of forking arise from time to time, Morton he said he did not think it was possible for it to happen, because no one organization contributes enough to the kernel to enable a forking. The level of contributions determines how much a contributor controls. With a forking, separate lines of the kernel would emerge, which could cause fragmentation and cripple standardization in the platform. "This is my little attempt to dispel those rumors. I don"t see any way in which [forking] could happen," said Morton.