14 DAY TRIAL // Linux enthusiasts have been keen to declare ‘the year of the Linux desktop’ every year for almost a decade now. But, while Linux offerings for the PC are as robust as they’ve ever been, in terms of market share the penguin hasn’t made much progress. That’s a completely different story on mobile devices, specifically mobile phones. Thanks to the success of Android in particular, Linux now has a significant market share on the mobile front, 25 percent of the smartphone market, and it’s growing at a healthy pace.
Yet, Android and Linux have had somewhat of a tense relationship for a while now spurred by a lack of communication and collaboration between the Linux kernel team and Google engineers. Things are looking up, though, and it seems like the two sides are, at least, talking again. The Linux Collaboration Summit is now underway in San Francisco and kernel developers are due to meet with Android representatives, hopefully to find a way to settle their differences.
The tensions arose from the Linux kernel team’s frustration with Google’s, apparent or real, lack of interest in sharing their progress. Google loves open source, but its method of development doesn’t coincide with the established open-source cannons. When Google starts a project it usually keeps its work behind closed doors for a period to facilitate a fast development cycle. It does this for open-source projects as well, it did with Android, it did it with Chrome and it did it with Chrome OS.
Google says this helps it focus on developing its product until it is ready to share it with the world. Google eventually shares the sources for all of its projects which incorporate other open-source code. The Chromium project, on which Google Chrome is based, is fully supported, for example.
But this lack of initial cooperation and general lack of communication has caused tension with the open source community, leading to the Android drivers to be removed from the Linux kernel early this year. The kernel team hoped that the move would be a wake-up call for Android developers, but the plan hasn’t really worked out. Google has continued focused development of its own kernel flavour, for which it offers the code under an open-source license, undeterred.
Now, the two groups are finally talking again. That doesn’t necessarily mean that Android code will be welcome back into the main Linux kernel any time soon. In fact, Google’s open source Programs Manager Chris DiBona says it may be a "multi-year" process. But he also says that, technically, this shouldn't be much of a problem as Google engineers have tried to stay as true to the original kernel sources as possible. Political differences aside, it’s clear that Android is a big driving force for Linux so a solution should emerge one way or another at some point. [via The Reg]