Cogs can think.

I was just reading this reply to a comment of Eugenia on the worst technology website on the web, Slashdot. Usually I avoid /. like the plague– its UI sucks, their commenting engine is unusable and extremely confusing, and they still use the old foot logo for GNOME stories. But anyway.

This guy says:

Since the Linux community has clearly not provided a system that matches your needs, I will again ask that you do not attempt to interfere in its development by advocating changes that could end up dumping binary drivers on us. We do not want them. We do not want what they will bring to our system.

He’ll be happy to know that the community is by far no longer driving the direction of the Linux kernel. He, and his geek friends, have absolutely no influence whatsoever as to what gets into the vanilla kernel and what doesn’t. Only the people on the engineering team do– I don’t see how that’s much different from how things go at Apple’s or Microsoft’s.

The people with the most influence over the kernel are the people that work at the big boys– Red Hat, Novell, IBM, and maybe Sun too. We, as users, have ZERO influence over Linux’ direction.