If this article quotes Ted Ts’o correctly, we have a problem.

The quote:

Ted Ts'o, a Linux kernel maintainer who joined Google in January 2010, said both Novell and Red Hat ship patches that were rejected by the Linux kernel but no one describes their distributions as Linux forks.
It's nothing new," he said. "Novell has a number of patches and SUSE ships with code somebody rejected but no one says Novell forked the Linux code. Red Hat ships SystemTap and no one says Red Hat forked the kernel."

Ted ought to know that systemtap is not a kernel patch. It has never been a kernel patch. It has never been posted to LKML as if it were a kernel patch. This makes his anecdote a lousy simile to Android, whose kernel does contain controversial patches. Portraying systemtap as if it were “rejected” or had any similarity to a kernel fork gives a completely false impression of the nature and history of the project.

I hope there was further context given at the conference, or else he was misquoted. Otherwise, the conference attendees were mislead, and our project was needlessly slighted.