Merging Allwinner support [LWN.net]

Merging Allwinner support

Posted Jun 24, 2013 18:26 UTC (Mon) by boog (subscriber, #30882)
In reply to: Merging Allwinner support by mato
Parent article: Merging Allwinner support

Indeed. Although not apparent in the summary email quoted in the article, it was clear on arm-netbook that the "apology" bit simply emerged as a presentational gambit, suggested moreover by Leighton's associates, not by him. Seems it is the done thing when asking favours from influential people or companies.

The whole thing was completely overblown. Leighton was in a position to influence people meeting Allwinner top brass and simply wished to make the most of the meeting for the benefit of free software, albeit at very short notice. The time pressure short circuited the background explanations that it turns out are essential when dealing with kernel developers.

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Merging Allwinner support

Posted Jun 25, 2013 16:24 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (1 responses)

The amusing thing about this, of course, is that one must apparently also "apologise" on behalf of successful SoC vendors for not consulting with kernel developers. Everybody likes to think they are free of cultural baggage, I'm sure.

Merging Allwinner support

Posted Jun 25, 2013 17:05 UTC (Tue) by nevets (subscriber, #11875) [Link]

Apologize for what?

The kernel is GPL, you can do whatever you like with it as long as you continue to provide the changes under the GPL guidelines. I don't see the kernel developers saying "you must apologize to us for not working with us". I saw several comments to let them keep their work out of tree. Their work is also under the GPL, and can be pulled in properly by anyone that wants to follow the Linux Kernel rules.

The whole "apologize" comment had no place in that conversation. If Luke needs to follow social customs and "apologize" on behalf of the kernel developers to gain favor from the managers at Allwinner, he could do that off the public lists.

In other words, if you are dealing as a liaison for two different cultures, you need to act the part of the culture you are dealing with. For Asian companies, that usually means being very humble and playing the political correctness game.

For dealing with the Linux community, just give out the facts. Saying that a decision has to be made in 4 days, but never say what will happen when the time runs out, as well as pushing, we need to accept the other implementation that DT already has without any technical reason but "it works for a successful company", shows that Luke didn't properly handle the situation at all.

There's no need to have to give an "apology" to the kernel community. Just state what has happened and see what you get. The answer was pretty quick: Device Tree, or show us why their system is better for *everyone*. Also, other workarounds were given too, doing a script for the conversion of fex to DT. But it did seems that Luke wasn't happy with these answers, and only wanted the kernel developers to change their mind. Which he gave no real reason to do so.

Perhaps he's doing a great job at pushing Open Source in otherwise closed companies. But he should also know how to deal with the Open Source developers in a more productive and diplomatic way.