The Linux Foundation collaboration summit [LWN.net]

The first Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit was held June 13 to 16 on Google's campus in Mountain View, California. This event could be thought of as the coming-out party for the Linux Foundation, the organization which resulted from the merger of the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group. Your editor was able to join this group, moderate a panel of kernel developers, and present his "kernel report" talk to an interested subset of attendees. This event has been well covered by many others, so your editor will focus on his particular impressions. Some other reports worth reading include:

Andrew Updegrove.
Danese Cooper: part 1 and part 2.
Bruce Lowry (even if he does describe LinuxWorld as a "technical show").
Glenn Seiler
Don Marti essentially transcribed the kernel panel.
Gerrit Huizenga.
John Cherry's summary of the Desktop architects' meeting held as part of the summit.

Your editor has been to a lot of Linux-oriented events over the years. The collaboration summit was nearly unique, however, in the variety of people who attended. It was certainly not a developer's conference, but quite a few free software developers were to be found there. It is not a business conference along the lines of OSBC, but plenty of executive-type business people were in the room. Throw in a certain amount of media (on the first day), a handful of lawyers, high-profile users from Fortune 500 companies, and some PR people and you get a cross-section of the Linux ecosystem from developers of low-level code through to the people trying to make that code work in serious business settings. It is rare that people from the wider community get together and talk in this sort of setting.

The stated purpose of the event was to promote collaboration across this wider community. The first step toward collaboration is understanding; the summit was almost certainly successful in helping members of the community understand each other better. For example, the kernel panel was a useful exercise in communicating the developers' thoughts to their user community. But a comment your editor heard more than once was that the most interesting part of the panel was just seeing how those developers interact with each other. Users, vendors, lawyers, and more were all able to discuss the ups and downs of Linux from their point of view. The bottom line is that things are going great, but they could be made to go quite a bit better yet.

Ubuntu founder Mark Shuttleworth was the keynote speaker for the first day of the summit. His talk covered a number of topics, but the core point, perhaps, was this: while we have many tools which promote collaboration within projects, we lack tools to help with collaboration between projects. Wouldn't it be nice to have one distributed bug tracking system and a comprehensive, distributed source management system? Maybe the kernel developers and the enterprise distribution vendors could get together and designate an occasional kernel development cycle as being targeted toward enterprise release - and, thus, put together with a larger emphasis on stability. In general, there is a great deal of friction within the system; removing that friction will be an important part of our future success.

Some themes were heard many times. There is a lot of interest in GPLv3 and the impact it will have on the industry. The message from the summit was that little will happen in a hurry, and that the best thing to do is to sit and watch. Everybody wants better power management and better device driver coverage. There is real stress between the enterprise customers' desires for stability, security fixes, and new features. Freedom matters: it is fun to hear a manager from Motorola talk about how using Linux makes it possible for the company to create interesting new products that couldn't have been done on "somebody else's stack." And, some press headlines notwithstanding, large proprietary software vendors were absent from the room - both physically and from the discussions which were held. This was not a meeting intended to design a "counterattack"; it was a way for the larger free software community to promote cooperation and understanding within itself.

Finally, the summit was clearly intended to help the Linux Foundation figure out what role it should really be playing. This organization is still relatively new; it has a short period of time to prove that it will be worth the fees that its members pay into it. The Foundation is settling into three basic roles: promoting the development of Linux, protecting Linux from threats, and working to standardize the platform. There appeared to be wide agreement that, by organizing events like this summit, the Foundation is off to a good start.

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