The Linux development philosophy and corporate contributions

von Christoph Hellwig (LST e.V.)

Donnerstag, 23.06.2005, UG3: Hebel, 17:00-18:00 Uhr

Open Source development in general and the Linux Kernel development process in particular look like from another planet to many programmers and managers used to traditional software development processes. But there's no reason the corporate world and the open source community have be separate worlds - in fact we've seen enormously increasing participation of corporate developers in Linux development over the last years.

This talk tries to explain the philosophy of the Linux Kernel community and outlines differences to other Open Source and Free Software projects, as well as development methods used in in-house and proprietary software projects.

I will present common pitfalls for potential contributors I've seen during my involvement both as upstream maintainer and contractor to hardware manufacturers, and show some examples for well-working cooperation between corporations and the Open Source community.

Über den Autor Christoph Hellwig:

Christoph Hellwig has been working with Linux since about 1995,
dealing with kernel-related issues much of the time. He has
been invloved in many Open Source projects, ranging from small fixes to major contributions.

After a number of smaller network administration and programming
contracts he worked for Caldera's German development subsidiary on various kernel and userlevel aspects of the OpenLinux distribution.

Nowdays he is working as a self-employed software architect and developer in the storage software sector.