What is Florian's strategy?

What is Florian's strategy?

Posted Oct 5, 2010 21:38 UTC (Tue) by Lefty (guest, #51528)
In reply to: What is Florian's strategy? by jra
Parent article: Microsoft sues Motorola, citing Android patent infringement (ars technica)

Hey, you're the one adamantly refusing to "capitulate" in the name of freedom, pal. I guess it's okay if it's Google, though. That's different. I guess.

But since you ask, in discussions at (in particular) the various Linux Foundation-sponsored Collaboration Summits to which I've been invited, with a variety of the kernel hackers, the subject of Google's use of open source has come up a number of times.

Google clearly has several heavily modified versions of Linux used in-house, and they've said as much, for various purposes. Those modifications are intended—as I said—to boost performance, mainly, particularly within their server farms. Since they don't "distribute" these versions of Linux, they're not obligated to share any of these improvements, and, indeed, they don't.

Now, on a couple of occasions, Google has attempted to share patches. In most cases, they've been rejected—as in the case of Google's proposed modifications to the kernel for Android—on a variety of grounds, for reasons that one might characterize as "wrongheadedness", "sloppiness" and the like. The upshot is that Google is pretty much the first organization around to fork the kernel in a significant and impactful way. Now there are two: the "regular" Linux kernel, and the "Android" Linux kernel. Thanks, guys!

It's been said—and this was reported right in the LWN article I pointed out to you—that Google itself recognizes that the quality of its own work, even when not secret, is too "godawful" for them to even bother submitting.

But why am I telling you this? You "work there".

Right?

Maybe if you spent more time cleaning up your code, and less time looking for trouble on LWN, we'd all be better off. Or is this how you spend your "20% time"?

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