How open is open?

By Derek Speed (Intel) (1 posts) on April 30, 2008 at 12:52 pm

A couple of weeks ago, I was on a panel on Mobile Linux at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Austin, TX talking about the Moblin.org open source project that is sponsored by Intel. I was joined by folks from the Google Android project, the LiMo Foundation, ACCESS Technologies and the OpenMoko project. While all of the projects are based on Linux, the approach taken by some of the other projects to building a true open source community is very different than the approach we are trying to take in the Moblin project. Fortunately for me, the approach being taken by the Moblin.org project resonated well with the LFCS audience.

Fundamentally, it's all about how open your project really is. I thought the days of saying your product was "open" when you published the APIs developers could use was over but based on the panel discussion, I was clearly mistaken.

To me, openness is about doing your development in a manner that allows people who are interested and capable to contribute. Clearly, you don't want to give world write access to your source code repositories but you do want people who have proven their ability to contribute positively to do so during the course of the development process. And this is one of the things that differentiates the projects under Moblin.org from some of the others that are trying to create a mobile Linux stack.

There is more that we plan to do in the Moblin project to make it easier for developers to contribute, but for now I think the approach we are taking is being well received by the community.

If you are a developer interested in creating software for MIDs and other devices but you haven't looked at the Moblin.org project yet, I strongly recommend you do so. Go to http://www.moblin.org and check it out. There is a lot of good stuff there with more coming all the time. We appreciate your input and feedback - please sign up for the Moblin developer mailing list at http://moblin.org/community/community_mail-list.php

Thanks,
Derek

Categories: Atom, Mobility, Open Source

Comments (2) Comments RSS Feed

By Jeff Moriarty (Intel) on May 8th, 2008 at 4:07 pm
Interesting post, because I get a lot of questions even inside Intel of how "open" moblin is and why. Thanks for sharing your thoughts behind your strategy.

By Danny Zhang on May 11th, 2008 at 8:18 am
Good to know the Moblin.org project resonated well in LFCS. There actually lots of people in other areas quite interested in the vision Moblin across multiple platforms like Mobile Internet devices, netbook/nettop, Health, CE, Embedded etc. especially in Asia.


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