Community Matters

Disclaimer on top (so no one can claim they didn’t see it): I’m obviously not necessarily an objective observer here. I work for Intel and have been involved with the Linux Foundation and its predecessor organizations for many many years. But this is my blog – unrelated to either organization (so if you quote me, please keep that in mind).

Some people might think the blog post at the New York Times that Intel hands Moblin over to the Linux Foundation is an April Fools joke. But even though the headline is a little unfortunate, the content of the article is correct: In order to make it easier for more people to get involved in Moblin, Intel has asked the Linux Foundation to take over the stewardship of the project.

This does not indicate any reduction in Intel’s effort on Moblin (quite the contrary, actually). Nor does it mean that dramatic changes are coming to the short term development plans. On the technical side it’s the same engineers doing the same impressive work.

But neither is this just a symbolic act – this really means that the Linux Foundation – a “nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux” (quoted from their About page) is hosting the project and will run it in a way similar to many other open source projects. The role of contributors will be determined by their merit to the project; which means that non-Intel engineers will hopefully soon step up into leadership roles. This is important for the pace of adoption of Moblin in the industry and (based on my conviction that true open source development is a huge advantage) this will cause the pace of innovation to increase even more. And it is something that would have been much harder to implement if the project is seen as only “Intel’s Linux OS”.

So to me this is great news. And from what I am hearing the same is true for many in the Linux community who have watched the first signs of life of Moblin with growing excitement. With the release of Alpha 2 a short while ago the traffic on our developer list has noticeably picked up – as has coverage in the press. And frankly, Alpha 2 barely scratches the surface of what Moblin will deliver.

Next week at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit I will host a Moblin track and I am very much looking forward to discussing what all this means with the attendees.