Android & Linux [LWN.net]

Android & Linux

Posted Apr 21, 2010 22:51 UTC (Wed) by nevyn (subscriber, #33129) [Link]

> Yet, in a meritocracy, the level of your profile shouldn't matter.

Sure, if you assume all people are robots and won't be affected by other people/company actions. But that's not true. One problem is that if the biggest/richest/etc. embedded developer says "sorry, we're too busy working to bother upstreaming" then it sends a giant red flag up for all the managers at the smaller embedded developers who will start asking "wtf are we wasting time on upstreaming, when google don't".

You _really_ want those questions to be asked the other way around, so you have to do whatever it takes to make the largest "DTRT" ... so that you don't have to have the same battle with 666 small companies.

Speaking as a non-kernel developer who bought an unlocked Nexus One, and is currently happy with Chris's comments that they just need to hire more people to get it done, and are in the process of doing that.

Android & Linux

Posted Apr 22, 2010 11:06 UTC (Thu) by AndreE (subscriber, #60148) [Link]

Those companies wouldn't know too much about Google's contribution if it wasn't constantly brought up. And if the attitude was slightly less biased against Google, it certainly shouldn't have been as news-worthy as it was. At the very least, the depth of the of discussion about Google in particular rather than non-compliance or non-conformity IN GENERAL seemed quite unbalanced. We picked a vendor a day, provide some analysis of their contributions, and easily come up with similar pros and cons of their interaction with the community.

Anyway, if other vendors' compliance is basically only motivated by their competitors adherence to open source philosophies, well, then the whole thing is just a house of cards isn't it?

Android & Linux - people

Posted Apr 23, 2010 12:58 UTC (Fri) by ndye (subscriber, #9947) [Link]

<blockquote>We pick [sic] a vendor a day, provide some analysis of their contributions, and easily come up with similar pros and cons of their interaction with the community.</blockquote>
A useful exercise indeed.
<blockquote>Anyway, if other vendors' compliance is basically only motivated by their competitors adherence to open source philosophies, well, then the whole thing is just a house of cards isn't it?</blockquote>
The FLOSS "house of cards" is, IMHO, the dependency on people getting along well enough to achieve a shared objective:
<ul>
<li>Someone has to articulate a worth shared objective.</li>
<li>Someone has to point the way for the team to achieve it.</li>
<li>Someone has to point out how the team can do better.</li>
<li>Someone has to encourage people to do right.</li>
<li>Someone has to discourage people from doing wrong.</li>
<li>There's more, and that's an understatement.</li>
</ul>
The hard work of "herding cats" is even more difficult for us who excel at studying things instead of people:   People don't appreciate being the object of being debugged (being poked repeatedly), and the process fails because people don't react reliably.
I'd think that hardware engineers should be better at it than software engineers:   I'm recalling an old Dr. Dobb's letter to the editor that described a (KGB-stolen or West-rejected?) computer that didn't always get 4 when adding 2 and 2, yet a Soviet computer engineer stuck with the job was able to tease out the circumstances that led to its failure modes and code up a program that reliably provided correct output.   Sounds just as difficult as debugging people.
And let's recall why Linus started his Minix replacement, via <a href="http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.minix/msg/b5fb8c03...">Google</a> (fancy that):
<blockquote>[Linux] uses every conceivable feature
of the 386 I could find, as it was also a project to teach me about the
386.</blockquote>

Android & Linux

Posted Apr 25, 2010 2:05 UTC (Sun) by martinfick (subscriber, #4455) [Link]

Google is not really an embedded developer, that is not whom they should be compared to. And if they were compared to embedded developers, they haven't done that bad, they have released their hardware specific drivers and even attempted to get them upstreamed.

But, they should actually be compared to a new distribution with a radically different approach to system design than other distributions. So, in this sense, if they do not upstream, they should be held accountable just like any other distribution. After all, Ubuntu got their share of complaints for this same reason not too long ago. And, at this, google has failed, they built new kernel infrastructure without community involvement and they expect this infrastructure to be used in newer roll outs. This is not a case of simply dumping support for a low volume device.

Being a large and a high profile company may not be a very strong reason to expect them to lead. But, since their "distribution" is high profile, and they are attempting to lead with this distribution, it surely seems justifiable to expect them to upstream the infrastructure required by this distribution or receive flack for not doing so.