Project To Mainline Android Kernel Changes Formed 73
ghostoftiber writes "From the article: 'Tim Bird, a Sony engineering veteran and the chair of the Architecture Group of the Linux Foundation's CE Workgroup, has announced a new concerted effort to get Android's changes to the Linux kernel back into the mainline Linux kernel tree.' Android has been using Linux 2.6.x for its devices since its release, with patches from Google. To date they haven't been merged back into the kernel mainline but existed on kernel.org. Some of the features such as wakelocks would help with Linux tablet projects, but other features aren't fully realized and support remains spotty. The radio interface layer ... still exists as an ATI/Nvidia-esque shim loader scheme with modem 'drivers' being nothing more than ihex files loaded by open code."
Re:Why bother? (Score:4, Insightful)
Because it aids collaboration, avoids duplication of effort, leaves more room for innovation from more people, more eyes make the bugs shallower, etc. The things that make open source a success to begin with.
If you think open source is all there is to open source, you don't understand it properly.
Re:Just say Nay! (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly. Google is being outrageously arrogant, IMHO. If you want your stuff in the kernel, submit a patch that Linus is happy with -- Google somehow believes that their stuff should get merged just because they are Google.
Clue for Google: IBM, Intel, and every other major player has coded, re-coded, re-re-coded, and absorbed and acted upon LKML input, without getting their feelings hurt (leastwise they didn't whine about it publicly).
It would be best for all concerned if Google's *good* ideas were put in a form that Linus and the LKML are happy with, and merged. The bad ideas should be left out. And merging cruft just because it is from Google is a Really Bad Idea. Cruft is cruft.