Embedded Linux and the community

Hi,

Today's LWN has coverage of a talk given by David Woodhouse at a
recent embedded Linux conference:

http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/306764/0ab5c35bce1efb1a/

--------8<--------
From Woodhouse's perspective, companies are "getting a lot better"
in terms of their Linux support. Less promising is the community:
"We suck, really". He looked at a number of community embedded
projects—like OpenWrt, Maemo, Moblin, and OLPC—to see how well
they work with upstream; what he found was rather discouraging.

By looking at several concrete criteria, such as how many
unsubmitted local kernel patches there were, how accessible
their source is, and how old the kernel is that the project is
using, Woodhouse is judging those projects the same way that
companies are measured. Of the four projects that he looked at,
only one, OLPC, was "mostly OK", the rest varied from "less good"
to "FAIL".
-------->8--------

It then goes on to explain "Woodhouse couldn't even find the kernel
source for Maemo".

Interesting stuff on an outside view of the "openness" of Maemo. The
other interesting thing is that the open source community (as
represented by maemo.org) is getting the drubbing here.

Cheers,

Andrew

--
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew@bleb.org | http://www.bleb.org/
maemo.org Community Council member

Interesting article!

Andrew Flegg wrote:
> It then goes on to explain "Woodhouse couldn't even find the kernel
> source for Maemo".

I saw your comment pointing out how clearly available it is. That remark
surprised me too.

For the most part, Nokia seems to be using the stock kernel - the kernel
guys have this idea that everyone using the kernel must have a bunch of
work done on it. It's essentially the same argument that GKH made when
he said "Canonical doesn't give back". while there is some truth to the
whole thing, I think it's slightly disingenuous of the kernel guys - not
every kernel user is making changes to the kernel.

According to Quim & Soumya's table of components & packages in the
platform:
https://garage.maemo.org/docman/view.php/106/354/maemopackages-20080725.ods

"kernel-diablo" has "only config patches" "kernel--diablo-source" is
listed as a Nokia modified package, but I have no idea what patches are
in there.

It's funny, though (and a mark of the success of Nokia's efforts) that
he considers "Maemo" to be a community project, when the package in
question, the kernel, is almost exclusively worked on within Nokia for
the Maemo platform.

Cheers,
Dave.

--
maemo.org docsmaster
Email: dneary@maemo.org
Jabber: bolsh@jabber.org

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 3:37 PM, Dave Neary <dneary@maemo.org> wrote:
>
[big snip]
>
> It's funny, though (and a mark of the success of Nokia's efforts) that
> he considers "Maemo" to be a community project, when the package in
> question, the kernel, is almost exclusively worked on within Nokia for
> the Maemo platform.

Indeed, I noticed that too :-)

However, I think it's clear he's not got a Maemo device; has never
tried hacking on one and doesn't follow the community. I don't think
we (incl. Nokia) can rest on our laurels yet - everyone who does do
those things wouldn't consider "Maemo" an open community project
(yet).

Cheers,

Andrew

--
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew@bleb.org | http://www.bleb.org/
maemo.org Community Council member

Hi,

ext Dave Neary wrote:
> Andrew Flegg wrote:
>> It then goes on to explain "Woodhouse couldn't even find the kernel
>> source for Maemo".
>
> I saw your comment pointing out how clearly available it is. That remark
> surprised me too.
>
> For the most part, Nokia seems to be using the stock kernel - the kernel
> guys have this idea that everyone using the kernel must have a bunch of
> work done on it. It's essentially the same argument that GKH made when
> he said "Canonical doesn't give back". while there is some truth to the
> whole thing, I think it's slightly disingenuous of the kernel guys - not
> every kernel user is making changes to the kernel.
>
> According to Quim & Soumya's table of components & packages in the
> platform:
> https://garage.maemo.org/docman/view.php/106/354/maemopackages-20080725.ods
>
> "kernel-diablo" has "only config patches" "kernel--diablo-source" is
> listed as a Nokia modified package, but I have no idea what patches are
> in there.
>
> It's funny, though (and a mark of the success of Nokia's efforts) that
> he considers "Maemo" to be a community project, when the package in
> question, the kernel, is almost exclusively worked on within Nokia for
> the Maemo platform.

If you look at the LWN kernel page article "Most active 2.6.27
employers" table "changed lines" side, Nokia is at least for that
kernel version listed higher than for example Novell or Intel.

I.e. you got it a bit wrong, Nokia works with the upstream community
so that less Maemo specific changes are needed.


- Eero

Hi Eero,

Eero Tamminen wrote:
> ext Dave Neary wrote:
>> It's funny, though (and a mark of the success of Nokia's efforts) that
>> he considers "Maemo" to be a community project, when the package in
>> question, the kernel, is almost exclusively worked on within Nokia for
>> the Maemo platform.
>
> If you look at the LWN kernel page article "Most active 2.6.27
> employers" table "changed lines" side, Nokia is at least for that
> kernel version listed higher than for example Novell or Intel.
>
> I.e. you got it a bit wrong, Nokia works with the upstream community
> so that less Maemo specific changes are needed.

Excuse me, I was ambiguous.

Parse this as: "The people working on the Maemo kernel are all working
for Nokia". I know & appreciate the upstream work being done by Nokia,
and didn't mean to suggest that you were working only inside Nokia.

Cheers,
Dave.

--
maemo.org docsmaster
Email: dneary@maemo.org
Jabber: bolsh@jabber.org

Hello

On Thu, Nov 13, 2008 at 2:48 PM, Andrew Flegg <andrew@bleb.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Today's LWN has coverage of a talk given by David Woodhouse at a
> recent embedded Linux conference:
>
> It then goes on to explain "Woodhouse couldn't even find the kernel
> source for Maemo".

I was at that conference and during that speech was going "yes" with my head as
I remember myself trying to find sources buried in a repository. So for one
I agree with what he said. The truth as I understand it is that Nokia is
doing a lot of work directly with upstream projects (see the
linux-omap mailing list)
and he really could have know that.

>
> Interesting stuff on an outside view of the "openness" of Maemo. The
> other interesting thing is that the open source community (as
> represented by maemo.org) is getting the drubbing here.

How many lines of code does maemo.ORG have that could be submitted?

Greetings

On Thu, 2008-11-13 at 18:07 +0200, Eero Tamminen wrote:
> If you look at the LWN kernel page article "Most active 2.6.27
> employers" table "changed lines" side, Nokia is at least for that
> kernel version listed higher than for example Novell or Intel.
>
> I.e. you got it a bit wrong, Nokia works with the upstream community
> so that less Maemo specific changes are needed.

Indeed - http://www.linuxuk.org/node/69

> - Eero

Regards,
Jamie
--
http://www.linuxuk.org

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Eero Tamminen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> ext Dave Neary wrote:
>
>> Andrew Flegg wrote:
>>
>>> It then goes on to explain "Woodhouse couldn't even find the kernel
>>> source for Maemo".
>>>
>
> If you look at the LWN kernel page article "Most active 2.6.27
> employers" table "changed lines" side, Nokia is at least for that
> kernel version listed higher than for example Novell or Intel.
>
> I.e. you got it a bit wrong, Nokia works with the upstream community
> so that less Maemo specific changes are needed.

But in this talk David is not interested in what nokia is or is
not doing. He is interested in what the communities are (not)
doing.

An example of a great embedded Linux _community_ is the nslu-2 Linux
port. They took a crappy vendor kernel port, rewrote drivers to
match mainline expectations and got eventually everything into the
mainline kernel and multiple distributions.

An example in maemo's case, some of the 770, N800 and N810
drivers never ended up in the mainline kernel. Nobody in the
maemo (or linux-omap) community adopted the left behind
drivers and submitted them for inclusion.

Woodhouse summed up his talk with a simple statement:

"We need to work better as a community before we can point fingers at
companies who don't play nicely".