Kernel contributor says Linux community 'can be intimidating'
- 20 January, 2010 12:42
- Comments (7)
A key Linux kernel contributor has admitted the developer community can be intimidating and hard to break into.
Jonathan Corbet, also the co-founder of LWN.net, highlighted the issue during his Linux.conf.au presentation on the Linux kernel.
Corbet discussed the seven challenges facing the kernel with attendees, the first being vitality.
He said the development process and community were depended upon to keep the kernel moving forward and evolving, but dismissed criticism that the volume of patches could dwindle.
“If you worry about the vitality of your development process, then you should really worry about a day that comes when we say ‘you know what, we’re out of ideas’,” Corbet said. “The vitality of the process is strong and things are working well.”
He said in a period of just over a year, 55,000 individual changes from 2700 developers, representing 370 employers, were made to the kernel, equaling 2.8 million lines of code. He boasted that the development process is “alive and active”.
“We’ve got a process that is merging 144 change sets every single day and adding over 7300 lines of code to the kernel every single day,” he said.
However, when questioned by an audience member Corbet agreed it can be difficult for new talent to get involved and be accepted by the Linux kernel group.
“Any development process that takes code from 2700 developers over the course of a year can’t be too exclusive, but it can be intimidating to come into,” he said. “There’s been a lot of work done to make it easier for people to try and come into our community… Things have improved a lot but there’s a lot further we can go.”
The other challenges discussed by Corbet during his LCA2010 presentation include: Scalability, storage, visibility, response, containment and hardware.
The latest release of the Linux kernel, 2.6.33 is expected to be out by the beginning of March.
More information can be found on the Linux.conf.au website.
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Comments
Jeenu
Sure it's intimidating. As the usability increased, "learnability" simply vanished
Boudewijn Rempt
This must be the absolute champion in the the category of articles-with-provocative-titles-that-do-not-match-the-content. So Corbet says the group of contributors cannot be exclusive, and your summary is "Linux guru concerned by exclusivity of kernel community"?
Yuki
Misleading title. I had hoped to read more about why and how it was intimidating. Not that the article didn't hold some interest, but really, try to keep on topic with your title.
Billy Western
It's good that the linux community recognizes its own collosal failure at increasing its popularity, but at this point I think Linux is too far gone for this to make a difference. Linux is dead folks, and this desperate smack at respectability only goes more towards confirming it.
rob
It's own collosal failure? What a load of negative anti-linux propoganda, from an obvious Micro$oft or Apple FanBoy lol.
Linux is only increasing in popularity, just look at how many desktops/laptops/netbooks are shipped with the Linux alternative today. Quite a few governments have already rolled over to Linux (google it), amazing for a product that has very little commercial backing / Marketing, unlike it's competition who have billions of dollars and thousands of employees invested into them.
Dead, what a load of bs!
Phil
How do you fail by having one of the fasting growing OS's in the mobile market, running ~85% of the worlds supercomputers, by Ballmer's own admission running 60% of servers on the internet and taking over the graphics market such that you're the technology behind movies like Avatar and other heavily computer generated movies?
If thats failure then give me a FAIL any day.
darryl
Yes, thats the classic linux argument, it's used in the mobile market, supercomputers, and servers, yes and some rendering farms.
All those are applications or uses for Linux OS, because it's a 'free' component that has been value added into a commercial product.
Ofcourse, if you're a phone manufacturer, and you are offered the components that make up the phone for free, and you can still sell you're product for the same price, the manufacturer of that product profits from FOSS.
But in any of those models you suggest, where is the mechanism that allows FOSS to DIRECTLY profit from FOSS ?
That is the fundamental issue holding back FOSS, or OS in general the developers are doing all their hard work on products that others happily profit on, and you consider that a good thing.
Sure FOSS/Linux has saved Google millions, or mabey billions in development costs, and software in general that they use.
So the shareholders, and executives of google can put another million into their personal wealth.
Until you find a model that works to reward the actual programmers of FOSS technologies, applications and you have to resort to putting in huge amounts of hard work writing code to make others rich and ensures you DO NOT get rich, (except the very very lucky few).
Take the FSF for example, they are a registered charity, their very existane relies upon the goodness of the likes of INTEL, giving them 'donations'.
So the FSF cannot even develop an acceptable business model to work under. The best you can hope for is to be employed by Red Hat and become one of many IT workers, which is not what you want to do if you are a programmer.
Programmers like to be paid too, why should everyone else profit from their efforts, everyone except themselves.
So in that respect, over the last 20ish years FOSS have been around, it's still very insignificant, and only thrives where it's a source of cheap software to be hidden in a back room, or under a mobile phone UI.
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