> I'm sure Linus Torvalds is fully aware of the possible
> consequences of the version change, and just accepted the breakage
> that this would cause.

Any application relying on sys.platform == 'linux2' is already broken.
It's exactly the same if an application checks for 'freebsd6' or
'openbsd4' : if you want to check for a specific operating system,
there's already POSIX' struct utsname sysname field, i.e. uname()[0].