Please excuse one more followup... [LWN.net]

Please excuse one more followup...

Posted Feb 4, 2010 1:12 UTC (Thu) by Epicanis (guest, #62805)
In reply to: See, NOW it makes sense... by morrildl
Parent article: Greg Kroah-Hartman: Android and the Linux kernel community

It's probably really strange that I feel compelled to post here - especially more than once. I'm not a developer nor do I even know any developers personally, I'm not wealthy enough to own Google stock, I don't own an Android-based device (although I would be happy to get one, I must confess I'd rather have something maemo-based...), and whether or not "wakelocks" ever get implemented in the Linux kernel almost certainly has zero direct effect on me. I think the only link I have to anyone with a direct stake in all this is that Greg KH maintains the staging tree where the only currently-working driver for my netbook's wireless network chipset resides. Why the heck do I care so much?...

"For our part, meanwhile, we have working code that's running on millions of devices, and we (also quite reasonably) are not eager to do extensive modifications to it simply for the goal of upstreaming it."

There. That (I think) is the entire point around which the argument turns. The rest of the PR fluff, hyperbole, and accusations flying in both directions seem to be obscuring this.

(the following paragraph is based on my potentially-faulty understading of the Android development timeline - corrections welcome.)

I understand Google doing the early development of Android in relative secrecy - it was probably the only way to get it working and have it out in the market before a surprised Apple/Microsoft/Etc. could stall it with patent lawsuits and whatnot. The customizations apparently surprised the mainline Linux developers too, though. "Here it is, mainline developers. Take it or leave it, but it's too late to change anything now that it's out." "What? What's all this? It looks like it has some problems." "You're leaving it then? Fine."

I understand the business reasons that I assume Google had for doing things this way. It's the way that it's being presented that seems to be stoking the fires.

And anyway, what's the hurry? Are we trapped in some hellish game where the goblins will devour us if we don't meet our quota for adding upstream code?

There's the presentation thing again. If "us" and "our" are read to mean "Google", it reads an awful lot like "And anyway, what are you Linux people gonna do to us it if we don't get our code upstream? Nothing, that's what!"

I'm guessing you just meant to convey that some code living independent of the mainline Linux kernel with no intention of ever being in the mainline kernel isn't the proverbial end of the world. I agree, actually - but it's still not unimportant.

Since we have working code, and it's not "less open-source" just because it lives in a different repo, why is this even an issue?

Here's my hypothesis, developed with all of the insightfulness and wisdom of a Random Pseudonymous Commenter:

Google is a huge, wealthy, influential corporation who is known to use a lot of Linux and therefore presumably has some sense of its worth, but now has split off its own "Android Linux" kernel, with some incompatibilities with the mainline kernel. There seems to be some fear that Big Powerful Google will attract more device-makers to write Linux drivers (which is a great thing), but said drivers will be written specifically for "Android Linux" and not everybody-else Linux (which is not so great) because who wants to, for example, write and maintain "wakelocks" and "no-wakelocks" versions of their drivers separately? This doesn't seem like an unreasonable prediction if Google is really dumping mainline Linux ("but we can still be friends, and that's okay...").

Sure, even if Google ends up just "throwing code over the wall" where mainline developers can sift through it and work on the task of translating the drivers to work on everybody-else-Linux, that IS much better than nothing at all. But it kind of hurts compared to what a more unified collaboration might accomplish.

And after all this, I'm STILL not entirely sure why I, personally, even care, but I do...

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Fragmentation

Posted Feb 4, 2010 20:32 UTC (Thu) by andypep (subscriber, #33588) [Link]

I agree with you, and I'm possibly even less concerned at an intimate level than you are.

What bugs me is the uneasy feeling that Linux may fail in the same way that Unix did - by being developed independently by a number of organisations that lead to a lack of standardisation and fragmentation. The GPL was the best bet to try to stop this happening by insisting on passing the modifications back into the pot, but this has to be de in a timely and considered manner if it is to continue to work that way. Previous forks have sorted themselves out in the market place - but it looks here like the kernel has developed two large separate markets that will go their different ways.

That bothers me in the medium to long term.