Return-Path: Received: (majordomo@vger.kernel.org) by vger.kernel.org via listexpand id S1751277Ab3HTKYP (ORCPT ); Tue, 20 Aug 2013 06:24:15 -0400 Received: from mail-ob0-f182.google.com ([209.85.214.182]:42213 "EHLO mail-ob0-f182.google.com" rhost-flags-OK-OK-OK-OK) by vger.kernel.org with ESMTP id S1750927Ab3HTKYO convert rfc822-to-8bit (ORCPT ); Tue, 20 Aug 2013 06:24:14 -0400 Date: Tue, 20 Aug 2013 03:24:59 -0500 From: Rob Landley Subject: Re: Kernel summit 2013: Call for Hobbyists To: Geert Uytterhoeven Cc: Francois Romieu , "Theodore Ts'o" , "linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org" , ksummit-2013-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org In-Reply-To: (from geert@linux-m68k.org on Sun Aug 18 03:26:03 2013) X-Mailer: Balsa 2.4.11 Message-Id: <1376987099.2737.63@driftwood> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; DelSp=Yes; Format=Flowed Content-Disposition: inline Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8BIT Sender: linux-kernel-owner@vger.kernel.org List-ID: X-Mailing-List: linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org Content-Length: 2735 Lines: 53 On 08/18/2013 03:26:03 AM, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote: > On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 11:02 PM, Francois Romieu > wrote: > > As a hobbyist, I have less time than most pro and must cope with > > whatever brain juice remains after the paid work. It doesn't make me > > Indeed. And the dosing of brain juice is not always aligned with the > steady > pace of Linux kernel development, causing hobyists to miss merge > windows, > resubmissions, and general follow-up. And those of us who don't have "follow linux-kernel" as part of a day job's responsibilities tend to be several days behind, so it's hard to participate in coversations. I seldom get paid to work on a current kernel. I _have_ been paid to beat some horrible vendor board support package with a rock until it sticks to the hardware, but this is invariably multiple years behind current and has a lineage like "vanilla kernel, forked by android for ice cream sandwich, then forked by TI's Netra Board Support Package, then forked by Polycom because implementing Skype in hardware seemed like a good idea at the time". (My last contract involved Centos 6.3, a fresh release with a 4 year old kernel. Lots of backporting stuff from ~3.4 to 2.6.32 or whatever it was using. Because that's when what I needed was feature complete and there were fewer API changes than current, that's why.) I do sometimes get to chip bits off and port them to upstream, after the fact, if there's time, and if my boss can shield the effort from every legal department's ironclad desire to do the absolute minimum required and no more. Usually there's just a nominal source tarball snapshot (no source control history, that's confidential) posted to some obscure website when the hardware finally ships (and the dev team's broken up), and if you _do_ diff this obsolete thing against vanilla the diff is multiple megabytes and most of it wasn't our changes. Intermittently getting paid to do that means I _don't_ qualify as a hobbyist, apparently. Even though the vast majority of actual open soruce programming I get done is in the downtime _between_ contracts. (I'm listed in MAINTAINERS for trying to prevent documentation from falling through the cracks when nobody else merges it through their tree. I got paid to work on Linux documentation once, for a very nice 6 months back in 2007, but I didn't get listed in MAINTAINERS until ~3 years after that stopped.) Rob-- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/