Harald Welte on his new role with VIA

Hiring a well-known free software advocate to oversee efforts to work with the community is a good plan for any company, but for a company that has had rocky community relations, it may be essential. VIA Technologies has done just that, by contracting with Harald Welte to help guide its strategy to work more closely—and less contentiously—with the community. VIA announced a new effort aimed at cooperation with the free software world last April, but got off to a slow start that had people wondering about its commitment to fulfilling that promise. Welte will be well placed to ensure that community concerns are heard within VIA.

Highly visible in the community for his work on things like netfilter/iptables and, more recently, the Openmoko phone, Welte has the skills to provide VIA with excellent advice. He has also won several awards for his work on GPL enforcement as founder and driving force behind the gpl-violations.org project. We caught up with Welte at this year's Ottawa Linux Symposium to discuss his new role.

Because of his work on Openmoko, Welte had been traveling frequently to Taiwan, making a number of industry contacts amongst the companies located in Taiwan. About nine months ago, he was "invited to talk to VIA and give them some feedback from the community". The company, he says, knew from the beginning it needed community input, but how to get that was not decided until late May or early June, when they asked Welte provide it on a regular basis.

The push from within VIA came from management, specifically product management, which is somewhat surprising—in the US and Europe, at least, it is typically engineering that pushes for better community relations. "It's a really big opportunity for me being a representative of the community to talk to a company at this high of a level. That's what makes me very optimistic."

VIA primarily needs to get drivers and other software for their graphics hardware cleaned up and submitted upstream. It is not just the X.org drivers for 2D and 3D graphics that need to be mainlined, there are also DRM and DRI patches that are maintained out-of-tree. He wants to see kernel patches get moved upstream to kernel.org, while X patches get merged into X.org code. A free 2D driver supporting most VIA chips, old and new, will be available soon.

Welte sees his role as "focusing more on the open source strategy inside VIA". That includes improving the skills of VIA's R&D group so that they produce drivers that are mainline quality. Various kinds of problems exist in the drivers, the coding style may not meet the kernel requirements or they may not use the proper APIs. Currently, drivers exist for new products that are supposed to ship with mainline drivers available; Welte will help ensure that happens. "I perceive myself as community person rather than a VIA person."

He points to Intel as a "shining star" example of supporting free and open source software, though "sometimes they might focus a bit too much on drivers than on open documentation," especially for wireless hardware. One of the areas that VIA is working on is open documentation for its hardware, but Welte isn't sure when those will be released—though some 800 pages were released this week. Schedules are largely out of his control, as they are subject to a wide variety of variables within VIA.

His role with VIA is a chance to "really make a silicon manufacturer understand how the open source community works and what the benefits are to working with it". He will be traveling back and forth from his home in Berlin quite a bit; "that's good, I love Taipei". He has also started to learn to speak Chinese.

It seems like a great fit that, in some ways, Dave Jones predicted in his blog posting linked above: "I'm beginning to think the only way VIA will ever really 'get it together' is if they employed someone from the Linux community who actually understands how all this works, because it seems someone in Taiwan isn't getting the memos." Perhaps a little late, but it seems that VIA has gotten and understood the memos now.