nolan The Linux Foundation? didn't you mean Canonical?
I used TLF as a loose "shortcut term" referring to what I would describe as the "Linux Industry" -- a informal/formal consortium of the major players active in the Linux environment (Canonical, Cisco, Google, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Oracle, Red Hat, SUSE and others), who, through independent and cooperative product development, have created a Linux-based ecosystem that dominates the server, cloud and enterprise business markets, as well as the emerging IOT market. Between them, the corporate players provide an enormous amount of code and other contributions to the kernel and have a loud voice in kernel development and maintenance. My designation of TLF was loose, but intentional.
I used Canonical and Ubuntu as an example because Reilly mentioned them, but the phenomenon I was referring to goes well beyond either in both principle and practice.
Linux, and the ecosystem that has built up around Linux in the last 10-15 years, has changed the ground on which Linux operates. Linux is no longer a tinkerer's domain, but instead inextricably linked with and tied to an enormous industry.
Greg Kroah-Hartman is, as Reilly pointed out, the decision-maker currently tasked with determining how and when kernel LTS builds are determined, and how long those LTS kernels will be supported, but he would be a fool of the first order to ignore adoption of a specific LTS kernel release by the major players developing products/systems/services around those kernels. He's not.
In the specific example used, Canonical's intention to support Ubuntu 22.04 LTS until 2027, almost mandates a decision to support the 5.15 kernel for six years, and I fully expect a decision, relatively soon, to extend the 5.15 EOL. My guess is that the decision has already been made for all practical intents and purposes.
I suspect that we discount the larger picture because we are primarily focused on the Linux desktop, which is a disorganized mess, with hundreds of distros, forks and spins, most of them essentially useless, and thousands of obscure packages that are, as often as not, indifferently maintained. The rest of the Linux ecosystem -- server, enterprise, cloud and IOT -- is very different.
