FreedomHEC Taipei 2009 [LWN.net]

By Jonathan Corbet
June 15, 2009

FreedomHEC (Freedom Hardware Engineer's Conference) Taipei was held June 10 and 11 in, unsurprisingly, Taipei, Taiwan. The event, sponsored by the governmental Institute for Information Industry, followed the huge Computex conference in the hope of attracting hardware developers who are interested in supporting Linux. Your editor, who had the honor of being invited to speak at FreedomHEC Taipei, would assert that the goal was achieved; over 200 developers showed up for two days of technical talk about the Linux kernel and the best ways to contribute to it.

Your editor arrived prepared with the talks which have become his stock in trade in recent years. Of the two talks, the most fun was certainly had on the second day, when the topic was how to work with the kernel development process. Anybody who has given talks in eastern Asia knows that getting audience members to participate and ask questions is not an easy task. But the FreedomHEC audience was (after just a bit of encouragement) full of questions and interested in having a discussion which could have extended far beyond the allotted time. There was, beyond doubt, a great deal of interest in working more closely with the wider development community. Your editor offers his apologies to Greg Kroah-Hartman, who had to wait rather longer than was proper for the lectern to become free.

Greg's talks were quite well received; his 2.5-hour tutorial on writing a device driver had the undivided attention of the full audience at the end of a long day. Peter Stuge gave a talk on CoreBoot (once known as LinuxBIOS). Harald Welte's talk on GPL compliance was also well received; the audience seemed much more interested in how to work with the GPL than how to get around it.

FreedomHEC was not dominated by outside speakers, though. Developers Jim Huang and Matt Hsu from 0xlab, [dirty hacks] who were clearly having a great time, discussed their work with the Qi bootloader. Fred Chien covered a number of hacks ("dirty" and otherwise) to make Linux boot more quickly. Joseph Chan of VIA discussed the various challenges he encountered while working to merge a driver into the mainline. They all appeared to be interesting talks; unfortunately for LWN readers, they were also all in Chinese, so your editor's reporting is necessarily spotty.

The Chinese-language talk which looked like the most fun was a high-energy session led by Chen Ing Hau, perhaps best known as the (since repentant) author of the Chernobyl worm. CIH (as he was referred to there) went deeply into the process of reverse engineering the appropriate register settings to drive a wireless network adapter. The talk proceeded with all the ups and downs of a good detective story, with the culprit, naturally, being caught at the end.

There is a certain missionary aspect to attending this kind of event. Harald Welte described it this way:

In about 8 hours I'll depart for FreedomHEC Taipei 2009, an event where members of the Linux development community try to help Taiwanese hardware vendors understand the Linux development model.

I personally believe this kind of event could not be any more important. The traditional PC and embedded hardware industry still has a very, very limited understanding when it comes to properly supporting Linux, aiming at the universal solution for best end-user experience. In order to achieve this, the FOSS development model needs to be understood, as well as the value of going mainline with the drivers/ports.

The group of industries often referred to as "Taiwan, Inc." has often shown a lack of understanding of how our community operates and, seemingly, a lack of interest in being a part of it. So FreedomHEC looks like an attempt to bring the Good Word to that part of the world. Certainly some people need to hear it. But your editor is not sure that those people were at this conference. What went down at FreedomHEC was hackers talking to other hackers, and they were having quite a good time in the process. It looked an awful lot like a Linux-oriented development conference.

Your editor has spoken in parts of the world where people seem to view software development as just another job, and not a particularly inspiring one at that. But Taiwan was not one of them. There are a lot of people working on interesting projects, and they show that excited, creative spark that suggests good things are on the way. They look like they want to be a bigger part of our community.

To that end, events which present information on how to work with the global community are helpful. But one thing is worth pondering on. When asked if they felt that their managers understood the importance of and value in working with the free software community, very few members of the audience raised their hands. Taiwanese developers, it seems, don't need much help in this area, but their bosses do. This is natural; why should Taiwanese managers be more enlightened than their counterparts elsewhere in the world? To solve this problem, we are going to have to engage in education at higher corporate levels. Management can be won over with sufficient persistence and energy - most of the time.

Events like FreedomHEC are helpful in this regard; they can give the local development community encouragement and the tools needed to carry the message to their companies. And there is always value in gatherings where developers can meet and talk about things over beer. FreedomHEC Taipei 2009 was an exemplary event of its kind; its organizers (led by Chao Lung Huang) deserve strong congratulations. Your jet-lagged editor is happy to have gone.

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