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

[From: Riku Voipio]

Eero Tamminen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> ext Dave Neary wrote:
>   
>> Andrew Flegg wrote:
>>     
>>> It then goes on to explain "Woodhouse couldn't even find the kernel
>>> source for Maemo".
>>>       
>
> If you look at the LWN kernel page article "Most active 2.6.27
> employers" table "changed lines" side, Nokia is at least for that
> kernel version listed higher than for example Novell or Intel.
>
> I.e. you got it a bit wrong, Nokia works with the upstream community
> so that less Maemo specific changes are needed.

But in this talk David is not interested in what nokia is or is
not doing. He is interested in what the communities are (not)
doing.

An example of a great embedded Linux _community_ is the nslu-2 Linux
port. They took a crappy vendor kernel port, rewrote drivers to
match mainline expectations and got eventually everything into the
mainline kernel and multiple distributions.

An example in maemo's case, some of the 770, N800 and N810
drivers never ended up in the mainline kernel. Nobody in the
maemo (or linux-omap) community adopted the left behind
drivers and submitted them for inclusion.

Woodhouse summed up his talk with a simple statement:

"We need to work better as a community before we can point fingers at
companies who don't play nicely".