What do you think of the Linux community in Australia?

I love it. That's why this will be my fourth time presenting at linux.conf.au. It is a very well-organized and active community, and it brings that distinctly Australian sense of fun to the whole enterprise. The U.S. has many Linux contributors, but they don't give the feeling of a single, unified community that one gets in Australia.

Are there any new big companies paying for development?

The list of companies has stayed relatively static, though it does get shuffled a bit from one release to the next, depending on what gets merged into the kernel in that cycle. One recent addition is Movial, which has hired a very active kernel developer and immediately found its way onto the top-20 list.

Which company/ies would you like to see participating or participating more?

I'm not going to name specific companies. But the embedded Linux area as a whole continues to suffer from a relatively low level of involvement in the development process. There are a number of reasons for that, and it is not that hard to understand why managers in those companies might conclude that community participation makes little business sense. But the long-term result is that the interests and needs of those companies have relatively little influence in how the kernel is developed.

So many of us have been trying to carry a message to embedded Linux companies for a while now: if you do not want kernel development to favour large, enterprise deployments over your own needs, you need to join the party and help ensure that next year's kernel will be suitable for next year's products. In the process, you'll get better code and the many benefits that result from letting the community help you make your products better.

There are signs that some companies are beginning to hear that message, but we have some ground to cover yet.

In a sense, the situation has not changed at all. There have been no major development process adjustments aimed at reducing bug counts, and the flow of features into the kernel continues unabated. Some developers still worry that the kernel is slowly deteriorating, and that we will wake up one day and find that things have gone too far, that our kernel is unreliable, and that our reputation for quality is gone.

Behind the scenes, though, quite is bit is happening. There is an increasingly fierce focus on preventing regressions and fixing them when they do happen, even if that means backing out features that others want. The reasoning goes like this: if everything which worked before continues to work in the future, it is hard to argue that the quality of the kernel is declining. But if things are allowed to break, then nobody knows for sure.

In support of this effort we have people tracking regressions, working on tools to find (or prevent) bugs, writing test suites, and more. There is also an increased focus on ensuring that patches are properly reviewed before being merged into the mainline. A lot is happening to make the kernel better. I am confident that, five years from now, we will say that we were able to accept unprecedented amounts of new code at a sustained rate for years while improving the quality of the final product.