I suspect there is enough of us that want diversity that someone will decide to split the OpenSolaris kernel from the userspace applications of OpenSolaris, and make it into replacement packages for the Linux kernel (and related subsystems).

My hope is that now that the GPLv3 is releases that some of the developers will deliberately add in the “GPLv2 or higher” to their submissions (Or use some other GPLv2+GPLv3 compatible license such as the new BSD license) so that at least those submissions will be able to be used in both Linux and other kernels. The Linux community has far more device drivers than anyone else.

I like the userspace software that comes with the various “Linux” distributions, and think the ideal would be an environment with a GPLv3 compatible kernel added to the same userspace as we use today.

In the Keynote for OLS this year, James Bottomley spoke about how diversity is necessary for evolution.
http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2007/view_abstract.php?content_key=254

He very specifically spoke about the need for forks in order to evolve, and I see licensing issues as being a perfectly legitimate reason to fork.

I don’t think the herd will ever get finished, it’s been in development for ten years, and they just started rewriting it from scratch because they didn’t like the particular micro kernel they were using, sigh….