I just returned from LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation’s premier conference, held this year at the warm, muggy Boston waterfront. There were many interesting items to report, these are only a few:

• MeeGo is emerging as a powerful alternative to Android, partly due to its excellent user interfaces (albeit highly Intel-centric driver support) but, in my mind, mostly due to its adherence to open-source standards. In opposition to Android’s divergence from mainline, MeeGo’s central philosophy is very much in line with the Open Source Way, and that is a very good thing to see in embedded Linux. I am hopeful that they will adopt much of the incredible work being done by the Linaro folks in bringing ARM support to Linux in general. Note as well that MeeGo has been selected by GENIVI as the reference software for future in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems, and MeeGo certainly looks up to the task. I may be forced to revise my prior opinions about netbooks as a result of the demos I encountered.
• Oracle had a large (though relatively ignored) table at the conference, and Oracle SVP Linux & Virtual Engineering Wim Coekaerts gave an interesting keynote the first day explaining some of the Linux-based work going on inside Oracle. This, however, was immediately overshadowed just after the conference when Oracle sued Google over the use of Java, a suit which appears to be not only baseless but outright hostile. News like this confirms the worries many of us have about Oracle’s stewardship of the valuable open projects they have acquired along with Sun Microsystems: Java, VirtualBox, and of course MySQL, which some have opined was the reason for acquiring Sun in the first place. (Personally, I tend to think it has more to do with Sun’s enterprise server customer base.)
• Speaking of MySQL, Monty’s excellent team has countered with a new fork called MariaDB, which looks remarkably like MySQL under the hood. They have also started a community: AskMonty.org, a meeting place for open database enthusiasts. AskMonty.org is the central point for MariaDB and provides downloads, a blog, and a developer wiki.
• On Monday, Teaching Open Source gave an education mini-summit that I was honored to help organize. Between 20 and 30 interested folks - educators, administrators, students, entrepreneurs, and industry professionals - came together to discuss the best methods for teaching open source and getting students involved in the processes and communities early. Many fantastic ideas were explored. Video and audio should be available soon, and Fedora hero Máirín Duffy has written up an excellent set of notes on the day.
• Yours truly gave a resounding talk (standing room only!) on the subject of desktop Linux entitled Desktop Distribution Showdown. The slides are available [PDF], and look for an article on the subject very soon be sure to read the exciting companion article.

All in all, LinuxCon and the Education mini-summit were intense, informative, and highly community-oriented. I was glad to meet new friends and see old ones, and I am already looking forward to next year.

Next week I will helping to run the Education Mini-Summit at LinuxCon. This summit is organized by Teaching Open Source, an open organization that brings together open-source industry leaders with professionals in education, including teachers, administrators, and even textbook authors, to promote open source concepts. The summit is free for those attending LinuxCon, which itself is the premier industry conference for Linux, and which is a great deal for educators and open-source professionals alike. If you plan to go but haven’t yet registered - and you’d better hurry, as it is almost sold out - contact me for a discount code.

I will also be speaking at LinuxCon (on the subject of desktop Linux, but you can bet there will be some discussion of embedded Linux as well!) and hosting an embedded Linux BoF on Wednesday afternoon. I hope to make the BoF an annual event at LinuxCon, so please stop in to discuss the embedded Linux community, open hardware, and anything else on our minds.

Also on the horizon is the ARM Technical Conference November 9-11 in Santa Clara, CA. This is ARM’s major annual event, and this year it features a Chip Design Conference as well as a System & Software Design Conference for three full days of ARM immersion. Early-bird registration (read: discount) is still open until August 30, so be sure to register early.

I am fresh back from OSCON and my brain is exploding. More on that soon, but first some news from the world of automotive “infotainment”.

First, go read Eric Brown’s piece on LinuxForDevices outlining GENIVI’s selection of MeeGo as the reference software stack for GENIVI. Also stop by ComputerWorld to read Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols’ summary from Friday’s blog.

For those who don’t know, MeeGo is the result of a merger between Intel’s Moblin platform and Nokia’s Maemo platform, managed by the Linux Foundation. I was able to speak briefly with folks at Intel in the booth this week at OSCON and they are definitely buzzing hard about MeeGo, and they have a right to be proud - MeeGo is a great accomplishment and a testament to Intel’s commitment to open-source. Kudos to Intel’s Open Source Technology Center.

For background information about GENIVI, go read this post on the MontaVista blog. In short, GENIVI is an alliance among auto manufacturers, in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) developers, and embedded Linux providers who are developing a new Linux-based reference platform for IVI. MontaVista is a member of the GENIVI board, as is Intel.

Now, for more background, see this blog post that explains MontaVista’s recently-announced relationship with Robert Bosch Car Multimedia, a premier IVI provider.

What does all this add up to? Hard to say, but from my perspective as an open-source philosopher and embedded Linux cheerleader, I’d say it is a big multi-way win among GENIVI and all of its members, Intel, embedded Linux developers in general, and, eventually, end users. Collaboration works so well it makes one wonder why some companies and industries still insist on competing the hard way.

What I want to know next… GENIVI has promised both x86 and ARM reference systems, so which ARM platform will GENIVI choose?

This week, I am traveling to Oregon to attend the Community Leadership Summit Sat-Sun and O’Reilly’s OSCON Mon-Fri. That’s a full week of high community involvement, and I am looking forward to every minute of it.

As regular readers know, I’ll be speaking at OSCON on the subject of the BeagleBoard, my favorite inexpensive single-board computer based on the ARM Cortex-A8. I’ll present detailed instructions on how to boot several flavors of Linux (with demos!) and I’ll have a prototype of the new BeagleBoard xM that is set to debut at the end of July. My talk is Wednesday at 2:30 just after Bryan Smith’s presentation on the SheevaPlug, which I am very much looking forward to hearing.

I’m also looking forward to the Embedded Linux Community BoF, which I’ll be running on Wednesday evening at 7pm. This BoF is opposite the recently-announced Android Hands-On, but I am hoping to stimulate a conversation more about the embedded community in general than about specific distributions. The roundtable discussion will likely focus on non-mobile embedded computing, particularly build systems like OpenEmbedded and the new crop of inexpensive reference platforms, and how communities can accelerate development, even among corporations (witness GENIVI, open-source success in the automotive industry).

I will also be joining the Teaching Open Source crowd at the Education BoF on Monday evening, where we hope to discuss many issues surrounding the Open Source Way and its impact on open-source concepts in education. A splinter group (ha!) will very likely stay late to discuss the schedule for the upcoming Education Mini-Summit at LinuxCon, which I have the honor to help organize. I’m also speaking at LinuxCon about desktop Linux and holding another Embedded BoF.

Yes, I love participating! Life is a contact sport, if you do it right.

Feel free to comment if you plan on attending any of these events, and you will win one (1) Jefro.net business card and a hearty handshake at the event in question. See you at the show!

We announced this morning that we are working on a new IVI venture in partnership with Robert Bosch Car Multimedia. This is exciting news, as it brings the power of a commercial Linux framework to the IVI experts, exploding proprietary software’s historical lock on in-vehicle computing. This partnership also plans to contribute to the GENIVI codebase as well, helping to accelerate IVI development.

Look for some very exciting things coming in IVI in the near future!

Hi folks,

This Friday is the last day to get presentation abstracts in for the ARM Technical Conference happening in November in Santa Clara, CA. This conference will feature over 60 sessions on everything from technical considerations to business decisions around using ARM products, and it will feature presentations from industry leaders all over the world. This is your chance to be one of those leaders!

Some technical folks I know decline to submit presentations for conferences out of shyness. Don’t let that stop you. If you have something important to share, public speaking can be a wonderful way to get your message out, and there are many resources to help with the speaking part.

Next Wednesday, June 30, is the last day for early-bird registration, so make sure to register now to save $300 - that’s your hotel bill or most of a plane ticket from anywhere in the country.

Hope to see you there!

I have the honor to be the track chair for the Embedded Internet session track at the ARM Technical Conference, November 9-11, 2010 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. This is the premier ARM-specific conference of the year, with over 60 classes, sessions, and tutorials. This is an important conference for all developers who target ARM processors with any operating system, but I believe it is of primary importance to embedded Linux developers, particularly those using Android.

The Call for Participation is open through June 25. If you would like to speak at the conference, now is the time to get your slides together and submit your abstract. The track with which I am involved will discuss the Embedded Internet – hardware, software, and cost considerations for managing network connectivity in embedded devices. I would love to see some proposals covering hardware and drivers, particularly 4G drivers for Linux, and business reasons for choosing one component, driver, or software stack out of the many options available.

Some important dates to remember:

• June 25 is the last day to submit proposals. That’s just two weeks from now, so get ‘em in.
• June 30 is the last day of early bird registration. Register now and save $300.
• August 30 is the last early registration day, still a good savings but not as good as early-bird.
• November 8 is the last day for advance registration, still saving $100 over onsite registration.
• November 9 the conference begins in Santa Clara.

Innovation is no longer about building a better mousetrap. It’s about building better-armed cats.

That was the first thought I had when I read late last week about Linaro[1], a new company formed in collaboration by ARM Holdings, Ltd. and five of its licensed semiconductor manufacturers (”semis”): Freescale, IBM, Samsung, ST-Ericsson and Texas Instruments.

Linaro promises to provide a “common software foundation” for ARM-based Linux distributions. Their stated goal is:

To make open source development easier by delivering a common software foundation across multiple distributions and vertical segments, deployed by the industries leading OEM, MNO, and leading semiconductor companies.

On the surface, as some bloggers have pointed out, Linaro looks like yet another loose industry conglomeration that promises to end fragmentation and promote a new era of goodwill among competitors. We have certainly seen this in the mobile world over and over again, with LiPS, LIMO, etc. However, there are a few differences with Linaro that make it worth watching.

First, Linaro is sponsored by a group of hardware companies, specifically ARM Holdings and five of its major licensees. Not software manufacturers. That makes a difference because the output Linaro has promised is software, not hardware, and free, open-source software at that. Semis have always offered reference software with their processors, but they have not historically created new companies to improve the quality of that software, so this is a new entity, and its role in the marketplace will evolve over time. The primary focus, though, is on software interfaces to hardware, which will definitely benefit developers worldwide.

Second, Linaro is not building a better mousetrap - they are not creating a separate ARM distribution. What they are doing is forming an alliance of all the big cats in the neighborhood and addressing their combined weaknesses. The mouse in question (Intel, as Om Malik points out) has a great ecosystem in place, and the consignees for Linaro have just created a unique alliance for the cats.

Third, Linaro is not a traditional consortium like GENIVI, nor a de facto oligarchy like Android’s OHA (a benevolent dictator is still a dictator). Nor is it a standards organization like LiMo. Instead, Linaro was formed as a distinct company, not a consortium, from the resources of its constituent members, which gives it a strength and individuality that a consortium can’t match. GENIVI, OHA, and LiMo would not exist without their parent organizations, but Linaro could conceivably break off from its parents and strike out on its own someday. (I did note that nothing has been announced with regard to monetization, which would have to come first.)

Our ever-insightful friend Bill Weinberg has pointed out this morning that Linaro aims to be “the glue between silicon and software”. That metaphor captures the essence of Linaro’s goal in terms of filling gaps and sticking together important pieces of a puzzle, although Linaro isn’t actually providing any new hardware glue - all of those companies are already good at producing drivers, kernel patches, etc. Linaro’s goal is rather to fill software gaps among various distros that come directly from semis, enabling them to spend fewer resources on the kernel patches and drivers, and differentiate themselves lower down the stack in hardware. That isn’t so much gluing software to silicon - it is combining resources to glue business competitors into a unified front against the big mouse on the block.

The four things Linaro promises on their wiki are tools, kernel, middleware, and validation suites. Development tools sound awesome, and they are a great place to add value. Kernel patches and drivers are always good, although reasonably motivated developers usually find a way. Middleware integration is key, of course. But I think the kicker is in validation - stability will rule the day, as it has done with Android. Moreover, this also provides a lot of opportunity for companies like MontaVista to add further value, as we do with Android testing in our recently-announced Android Rapid Development Program.

There are four questions that remain vital in my mind:

• What kinds of tools are coming? This is a personal interest, I guess - I started my career with tools, so I’m always interested.
• How and when will they monetize Linaro?
• How will this newfound consolidation propagate patches upstream and reduce some of the existing fragmentation? Not just licenses, which they have promised to uphold, but actual bits? I feel very positive about Linaro being able to do this. Linaro has announced a Kernel Consolidation Team as well as a Landing Team, both of which have charters to push patches upstream and work with the upstream maintainers. Moreover, all of the organizations involved are keenly aware of the value of propagating changes back into the pot, and many (in particular IBM and Freescale) already make significant contributions to the Linux community.

  I strongly believe that if Linaro sticks to their commitment to cooperate with the community, they will succeed wildly. I would go so far as to say that committed community involvement is the single most important factor in their success.

• Where do software providers fit into this puzzle? This question is very close to my heart. I can make educated guesses about where providers - both free providers like Ubuntu and commercial providers like MontaVista - will fit in. Primarily I see this as a huge benefit to developers in terms of less market fragmentation and a more unified base of drivers, tools, and tests, which ultimately leads to higher quality products, a stronger ecosystem, and a stronger community.

As a Developer’s Advocate, I approve. And I’m anxious to see how the cats get along.

[1] For those wondering, Linaro is a horse - not just any horse, but a prize Holsteiner stallion. Born in 1989, he is the genetic ancestor of a number of “approved” (read: award winning) stallions.

In case you missed it, MontaVista consultant Sachin Kaushik held an excellent webinar last week where he discussed how to make Android ready for a commercial device. The recorded webinar is now available, and you can also see the ongoing Q&A discussion over on the Meld community.

What I most liked about this session was that he addressed the software as another cog in the system, one that is not pre-configured in any sense of the word. As I stated recently in a post about the MontaVista Android Rapid Development offering, the Android OS and ecosystem are great, but they are not a simple drop-in solution to be checked off. Sachin covered this aspect of Android quite well and outlined the specific modifications that must be made in order to “port” Android to a new device environment.

Hi all,

I will be hosting Embedded Linux Birds-of-Feather discussions at OSCON (Portland OR, July 19-23) and LinuxCon (Boston MA, August 10-12). Please join me to discuss all things embedded Linux, including industry trends, communities,

Description

This birds-of-a-feather group discussion centers on finding ways to make the embedded Linux community more approachable and usable. Various individual communities will be discussed as well as the increasing use of social media.

Abstract

Community is a fluid concept that readily crosses competitive boundaries, as evidenced by the numerous hardware and software communities sponsored by vendors or established in open-source venues. However, there is no central point. Where can I go if I have a question or just want to listen to the questions of others? How do I even go about finding out whom to ask?

Since all developers are members of different communities, this BoF is open to everyone. The discussion topic is how to make “the embedded Linux community” as a whole more approachable and easier to navigate for both the beginner and the experienced developer, project manager, support engineer, or technical writer.

Dates, Times, Places

• OSCON Embedded Linux BoF: July 21, 7pm
• LinuxCon: TBD