

Fair, the patches don’t have to be accepted. 🙂
Would it be bound by the GPL? Companies love writing shims, and the Linux kernel is pro-business. It is specifically GPLv2 to allow companies to use it in closed source applications. TiVo is the poster child for this.
Anything running in user space isn’t considered a derivative work. The kernel ABI specifically allows for this. A closed source application could run on top of the Linux kernel and not have to be released.
Applications linking to a GPL library, glibc excluded, would have to be released since that would constitute a derivative work.
I’m the PS6 scenario, we would probably get very little usable code. The GPL is old, and companies have had lots of time to work around it.





For some people, they don’t actually care about the politics of FOSS; they want a portfolio for employers.