Submitted by In a surprising move, Andrew Morton, the Linux kernel co-maintainer, announced that he is moving to Google and that he will continue being a Linux maintainer. A detailed article can be found here: “It is beneficial to me (and to Linux) that I be in day-to-day contact with people who use Linux for real things. Hence Google is a good all-round fit.”
I say good luck to Mr. Morton, a great contributor to Linux. The talent he has deserves good pay. I am sure he will be a great asset anywhere he goes.
–Anonymo
The FOSS movement like its proprietary cousin has something in common == they need jobs to pay the bills and the jobs are the same.
Except that in the OSS model, the work developed by employees working for many different companies are shared with the world under very reasonable terms. OSS isn’t a silver bullet that eliminates development costs and living expenses, but it does virtually eliminate the need to reinvent the wheel, and that is very important to smaller software vendors.
What a poke at the Linux community: “… with people who use Linux for real things.”
I guess he’s referring to all the obsessive kernel-compilers.
No, he’s not talking about Linux enthusiasts/hobbyists, he’s talking about the kernel development community. When you spend every waking hour hacking the implementations of various system calls, for example, you tend to lose sight of how application and library developers use those interfaces in the first place.
…be a first step to Google’s own Linux distro?
oh god, don’t start that rumor up again
oh god, don’t start that rumor up again
Why not? This time it even has substance. Why would Google want to have the Linux kernel maintainer working full-time for Google if they didn’t have a serious interest in the operating system?
Google already has a serious interest in Linux … inside their server farms. There is no evidence that the outside world will ever see Google’s innovations like GFS, BigTable, scalable system management, power management, etc.
There is no evidence that the outside world will ever see Google’s innovations like GFS, BigTable, scalable system management, power management, etc.
How does this tally with FOSS ethos? If AM gets his hands on those things and finds that, because they are in the kernel and being distributed, they must be GPL, why wouldn’t he share them with the world? I don’t think an NDA is supposed to legally stop that. Of course, a big fat pay-cheque will.
I think that this is another case where I can recommend reviewing the GPL, and try taking the GNU GPL Quiz[1]. Don’t worry about missing a few (or a lot of) questions. I never claimed to be an expert, myself, and did not score 100% on it.
Any individual or group is entitled to do whatever changes to the code they wish, and keep it private, as long as they don’t re-distribute it outside that organization.
[1] http://www.gnu.org/cgi-bin/license-quiz.cgi
If AM gets his hands on those things and finds that, because they are in the kernel and being distributed,
They’re not being distributed. That’s Google (and other networking companies) loophole. Those are all features in Google’s internal server farms.
A better question is, why wouldn’t Google want to have possibly the single most knowledgeable and talented Linux kernel developer on the planet? He knows every subsystem inside-and-out, plus most of the important device drivers, and his influence in the community is surpassed only by Linus. Seems like a no brainer for any Linux-related company, regardless of their interest in the Linux distribution market.
Why not? This time it even has substance. Why would Google want to have the Linux kernel maintainer working full-time for Google if they didn’t have a serious interest in the operating system?
Ummm… maybe because their entire infrastructure was build from the ground up on Linux? Just a thought.
no.
“It is beneficial to me (and to Linux) that I be in day-to-day contact with people who use Linux for real things. Hence Google is a good all-round fit.”
If you wanted to be in day-to-day contact with people who use linux for real things then you would either be working for a linux distributor or doing private consulting for the linux platform. Working for Google will limit how people use linux to only one company.
Also to note is what kind of NDA’s will he have to sign. Its going to be hard for him to keep the differences between what he uses at work and what he releases to the public. I think Google is going to have a hard time keeping the two seperate.
I won’t get into why he felt he had to justify his job working for Google. Sounds like a load of it to me. He took the job with Google because its just that, working for Google with its benefits.
The Linux community is much better off with Andrew working for Google than for Red Hat or Novell. I don’t think I need to make that any clearer.
Kernel developers from various big-name players in the computer industry have signed NDAs and simply don’t contribute encumbered technology to the kernel. The kernel community isn’t interested in encumbered technology, although they certainly might be interested in some of Google’s technology if they would release it under the GPL and grant any applicable patents to an acceptable commons.
Certain contributions will never be accepted regardless of technical merit because they don’t fit the goals of the Linux kernel, particularly the goal to provide clean and clear implementations. Pageable kernelspace is a good example of a feature that some people would benefit from but has no clean implementation (that I know of).
There is no conspiracy theory here, Andrew’s previous employer, Diego Interactive, was no longer willing to continue the previous arrangement, and Google probably offered him more money. The only possibly impact of this move on the kernel community is a possible increase in Andrew’s productivity due to his access to Google’s advanced development tools.
No, I don’t work for Google…
I still don’t see how Andrew working for Google will help the kernel developers or community. He’s still limited to seeing how only one company uses the kernel and not how mulitple companies will use it. This is why him working for a linux distributor would be better. You never detailed on how it would be better for him to work for Google. Like I said before, it just boils down to him working there for the crazy benefits.
“I still don’t see how Andrew working for Google will help the kernel developers or community. He’s still limited to seeing how only one company uses the kernel and not how mulitple companies will use it. This is why him working for a linux distributor would be better. You never detailed on how it would be better for him to work for Google. Like I said before, it just boils down to him working there for the crazy benefits.”
Well, let the man work for whom he wants to work. People here only say “so how this benefict the community?” Don’t you ever think a little about kernel developers personal interests? That they are commited to open source doesn’t mean they can’t have a life or a decent job, or even quit developing FOSS if they want to.
I’m all for him working for Google. I have no issues with that. I just disagreed with his statement that he gave of why he is working there and how it is beneficial to linux. Beneficial to him? Most definitely. If working for Google brings him more peace and joy then good for him. No one said he had to quit developing FOSS, I’m sure a man of his position is an excellent coder and to do so would be talent thrown down the drain.
Good luck convincing anybody in the kernel community that the maintainer of the development branch of the stable Linux kernel tree should work for a Linux distributor. That is a monumental conflict of interest.
Google has virtually no stake in the feature-set of the mainline Linux kernel. They can maintain whatever kind of internal kernel tree they want, and they don’t even need to GPL their modifications. Google exports a high-level API to 3rd party developers, and there is nothing that ties this API to the mainline kernel.
The big Linux distributors have an obligation to their customers to keep their kernel trees and feature-sets more-or-less compatible with each other and with the kernel.org tree. Particularly since userspace is bound more tightly to the kernel than ever through the use of interfaces like sysfs, it is imperative that the mainline kernel continue to work with as many distributions as possible. If any of the distributors had a disproportionate influence on the mainline kernel, they could use this to gain a strategic advantage over their competitors and generally stifle progress.
I though this would be mostly obvious to OSNews readers…
“I though this would be mostly obvious to OSNews readers”
I took the liberty of rewriting your statement to:
“I though this would be mostly obvious to OSNews readers who have a deep level of interest in linux developent.”
Not all of us like getting our fingers *that* dirty 😉
Good luck convincing anybody in the kernel community that the maintainer of the development branch of the stable Linux kernel tree should work for a Linux distributor. That is a monumental conflict of interest.
As of this morning, and for the next three weeks, the maintainer of the development branch of the stable Linux kernel tree is Greg K-H.
who works for Novell…
You were saying?
oops.
Edited 2006-08-07 21:42
alan cox –> redhat
Kernel developers from various big-name players in the computer industry have signed NDAs and simply don’t contribute encumbered technology to the kernel.
Google is one of the big name players in the industry whose kernel developers have signed NDAs and simply don’t contribute encumbered technology to the kernel. In that respect it’s no different than RedHat or Novell as an employer.
Goog is one of the most secretive companies in the computer business.
Linux does not have a pageable kernel? Interesting… I guess it’s not important if you can keep the kernel small and light, but Windows has had this since the inception of NT.
I think that it is lost on people that he can do whatever he wants. I appreciate what he has done for my computer but if he wants to stop contributing to the world and myself then that is alright. He has the right to make a spectacular living. If he were to never contribute another scrap of code to the community again he would have already done a thousand times as much good as the average person.
No I’ve never spoken to Andrew before and I am not his wife.
Hopefully Google will do the right thing and will give back some of their very powerful technology and wealth that would only have been possible with the help of people like Andrew Morton, and others. However, I don’t feel like the average Linux user is entitled anything from these people. We all invest in our future and all of Andrew’s work up until now could be seen as a way of getting to have the pimp job at Google. It just may be that he had to help a few people along the way.
I agree, Andrew should be free even to make porno if we wants…and has the right to make the most out of it.
Google’s strategy is to predate the FOSS in a way not even Microsoft could do (the nice one ;-), taking away from people what is free so that they can sell it). Yeah, you can say “we are committed with the FOSS community”… but the bottom line is that they have investors to please (yes, including me ;-)), a huge market share to alienate and a bunch of competitors to scare….
The good news is that Andrew Morton is not indispensable…if we want to keep the FOSS community strong, we should do it with or without the luminaries.
I hope it works out for you
“How does this tally with FOSS ethos? If AM gets his hands on those things and finds that, because they are in the kernel and being distributed, they must be GPL”
Google isn’t distributing a Linux distro and until they do there’s no need for them to share the code for their in-house systems.
Also, FOSS != GPL.
Google isn’t distributing a Linux distro and until they do there’s no need for them to share the code for their in-house systems.
Even if google distributed a Linux distro, they wouldn’t have to share their in-house systems code unless they included the binaries for the in-house stuff in the distro.
It wouldn’t make good business sense for google to do that.
“Even if google distributed a Linux distro, they wouldn’t have to share their in-house systems code unless they included the binaries for the in-house stuff in the distro.”
Err yeah, that’s what I ment to say
I fail to see how this is a surprising move. His current work situation was getting worse so he moved on to something better. How on earth is this in any way surprising?
this is a test comment