Here's a Random Thought
Probably a fusion of being back on the developer wagon again and reading Slashdot, but I had a thought:
One of Linux’s major problems is backwards compatibility. So, imagine we asked the following question of the entire community:
“If we froze Linux 2.6-current, GCC 4.1-current, GLibc-current, autotools, and a few other critical things with binary compatibility, what features must be added or fixed for you to be happy with that platform for two years?”
Call it the Linux Standard Platform 1.0. Package it as a single unit and pressure developers to support it.