[maemo-developers] [LWN] Embedded Linux and the community

[From: Andrew Flegg]

Hi,

Today's LWN has coverage of a talk given by David Woodhouse at a
recent embedded Linux conference:

    http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/306764/0ab5c35bce1efb1a/

    --------8<--------
    From Woodhouse's perspective, companies are "getting a lot better"
    in terms of their Linux support. Less promising is the community:
    "We suck, really". He looked at a number of community embedded
    projects—like OpenWrt, Maemo, Moblin, and OLPC—to see how well
    they work with upstream; what he found was rather discouraging.

    By looking at several concrete criteria, such as how many
    unsubmitted local kernel patches there were, how accessible
    their source is, and how old the kernel is that the project is
    using, Woodhouse is judging those projects the same way that
    companies are measured. Of the four projects that he looked at,
    only one, OLPC, was "mostly OK", the rest varied from "less good"
    to "FAIL".
    -------->8--------

It then goes on to explain "Woodhouse couldn't even find the kernel
source for Maemo".

Interesting stuff on an outside view of the "openness" of Maemo. The
other interesting thing is that the open source community (as
represented by maemo.org) is getting the drubbing here.

Cheers,

Andrew

-- 
Andrew Flegg -- mailto:andrew at bleb.org  |  http://www.bleb.org/
maemo.org Community Council member