The Home Appliance Industry and open source code camp have serious differences in Linux development

At the "2005 CE Linux Forum Plenary Meeting (2005 CE Linux Forum Plenary)" held by the Liunx Industry Group CE Linux Forum (CELF, CE Linux Forum) in San nose, USA, the differences between the home appliances industry and the open source code camp are obvious. It is still time for the two sides to agree with each other. This was evident at the seminar (figure 1) attended by Andrew Morton, Linux 2.6 kernel manager, and CELF member companies. Many programmers who are interested in enterprise-level servers have participated in Linux development projects. At the seminar, Morton said: "Linus Torvalds, the father of Linux, and I have always been looking forward to the contribution of the embedded product industry." But it is undeniable that, there are not too many codes developed by programmers embedded in product vendors ".

In order to complete an open source code development project, many people must first provide the relevant code. Then, the project members finally decide the code used for the project by exchanging opinions. Mo Dun said that despite listening to the requirements of various industries as fairly as possible, but "a year ago I heard from Tim bird (CELF Linux architecture development director and Sony Electronics senior Linux architecture and standards engineer) The requirements of the home electronics industry. However, the household electronics industry has not provided much code ".

How to open it?

The reason for this situation is that, for an extremely competitive household appliance manufacturer, no one will hesitate to publish self-developed programs as open source code. This is evidenced by the fact that "CE Linux Forum Member Confidential (only available to CELF members)" is included in the public materials presented at the meeting. In addition, the development of embedded product Linux also has some obstacles. That is to say, it is difficult to establish an environment for running programs on embedded-purpose microprocessors for testing. In this regard, the Linux Project Manager attending the CELF Conference stressed that, if necessary, developers can sign a secret agreement to lease the test platform.

Another obstacle affecting embedded Linux development is that programmers working for home appliance manufacturers in Asia are hard to participate in a heated debate in the open source code camp that primarily communicates in English. According to morton, programming staff from various countries in Asia participated in the mailing list on the Linux kernel. Such incidents occurred during the CELF meeting. At a meeting held by the "Mobile Phone Profile Working Group (Mobile Phone specification Working Group)" to discuss Mobile Phone Linux, although it was reported that NEC and the Panasonic Electric Appliance Industry have set up new APIs for mobile phone specifications (application level interfaces), the materials are all written in Japanese, it indicates that the English version will not be made public until 2005.

According to morton, in the future, the contribution of the household electronics industry to the Linux technology progress will not be too high. "For development projects that streamline code or support multiple microprocessor types, progress is now relatively smooth" (Morton ).

Source: sunjing BP