Kernel summit 2013: Call for Hobbyists

Kernel summit 2013: Call for Hobbyists

[Theodore Ts'o]

As an experiment this year, the Linux Kernel Summit Program Committee
would like to put out a call for hobbyists. This year, we have up to
three places to give to people who do Linux Kernel development as a
hobby rather than a profession (Our definition of "hobbyist" is anyone
who doesn't get paid to work on Linux).  The Linux Kernel Summit will be
held this year in Edinburgh from 23-25 October and, on the core day (the
24th of October), will primarily be concentrating on processes around
kernel development.  Since most top kernel developers are not hobbyists
these days, this is your opportunity to make up for what we're missing.
As we recognize most hobbyists don't have the resources to attend
conferences, we're offering (as part of the normal kernel summit travel
fund processes) travel reimbursement as part of being selected to
attend.

To apply, please send a proposal outlining what you do, what you'd bring
to the kernel summit and preferably what you think the current kernel
processes should be doing to encourage more hobbyist contributions (or
should not be doing because it discriminates against hobbyist
contributions) to:

ksummit-2013-discuss@lists.linuxfoundation.org

Please add the prefix [HOBBIST ATTEND] to the subject line of your
e-mail so we can easily find your proposal.

Descriptions of particularly cool hobbyist projects in the kernel which
have been overlooked by the mainstream might also be good topics for
discussion.  Since the Kernel Summit is only two months away, we're
looking to have hobbyist proposals submitted by 24 August.  We know that
this is a tight timetable and we apologize; this idea came up too late
for us to provide better notice.  The current plan is to make the
hobbyist slots a permanent part of the selection criteria, so things
should be less rushed in the coming years.

Re: Kernel summit 2013: Call for Hobbyists

[Borislav Petkov]

On Wed, Aug 14, 2013 at 10:26:21PM -0400, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> Please add the prefix [HOBBIST ATTEND] to the subject line of your

s/HOBBIST/HOBBYIST/

-- 
Regards/Gruss,
    Boris.

Sent from a fat crate under my desk. Formatting is fine.
--

Re: Kernel summit 2013: Call for Hobbyists

[Rob Landley]

On 08/14/2013 09:26:21 PM, Theodore Ts'o wrote:
> 
> As an experiment this year, the Linux Kernel Summit Program Committee
> would like to put out a call for hobbyists. This year, we have up to
> three places to give to people who do Linux Kernel development as a
> hobby rather than a profession (Our definition of "hobbyist" is anyone
> who doesn't get paid to work on Linux).

Doesn't get paid to work on the _kernel_, or doesn't get paid to fiddle  
with programs that happen to run on Linux?

Rob

Re: Kernel summit 2013: Call for Hobbyists

[Francois Romieu]

Theodore Ts'o <tytso@thunk.org> :
[...]
> To apply, please send a proposal outlining what you do, what you'd bring
> to the kernel summit

An umbrella to start with. :o)

While the (highly variable amount of) kernel work I do is intellectually
rewarding at times, it's not exactly the kind of cool or important thing
that deserves to be talked about in a yearly meetup.

As a hobbyist, I have less time than most pro and must cope with
whatever brain juice remains after the paid work. It doesn't make me
an endangered species urging for positive discrimination.

Things may be quite different for hobbyists with cool projects. I'm
curious to know if such a thing exists and if he/she does not turn
into something else anyway.

-- 
Ueimor

Re: Kernel summit 2013: Call for Hobbyists

[Geert Uytterhoeven]

On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 11:02 PM, Francois Romieu <romieu@fr.zoreil.com> wrote:
> As a hobbyist, I have less time than most pro and must cope with
> whatever brain juice remains after the paid work. It doesn't make me

Indeed. And the dosing of brain juice is not always aligned with the steady
pace of Linux kernel development, causing hobyists to miss merge windows,
resubmissions, and general follow-up.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                        Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert@linux-m68k.org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                -- Linus Torvalds

Re: Kernel summit 2013: Call for Hobbyists

[Rob Landley]

On 08/18/2013 03:26:03 AM, Geert Uytterhoeven wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 16, 2013 at 11:02 PM, Francois Romieu  
> <romieu@fr.zoreil.com> wrote:
> > As a hobbyist, I have less time than most pro and must cope with
> > whatever brain juice remains after the paid work. It doesn't make me
> 
> Indeed. And the dosing of brain juice is not always aligned with the  
> steady
> pace of Linux kernel development, causing hobyists to miss merge  
> windows,
> resubmissions, and general follow-up.

And those of us who don't have "follow linux-kernel" as part of a day  
job's responsibilities tend to be several days behind, so it's hard to  
participate in coversations.

I seldom get paid to work on a current kernel. I _have_ been paid to  
beat some horrible vendor board support package with a rock until it  
sticks to the hardware, but this is invariably multiple years behind  
current and has a lineage like "vanilla kernel, forked by android for  
ice cream sandwich, then forked by TI's Netra Board Support Package,  
then forked by Polycom because implementing Skype in hardware seemed  
like a good idea at the time". (My last contract involved Centos 6.3, a  
fresh release with a 4 year old kernel. Lots of backporting stuff from  
~3.4 to 2.6.32 or whatever it was using. Because that's when what I  
needed was feature complete and there were fewer API changes than  
current, that's why.)

I do sometimes get to chip bits off and port them to upstream, after  
the fact, if there's time, and if my boss can shield the effort from  
every legal department's ironclad desire to do the absolute minimum  
required and no more. Usually there's just a nominal source tarball  
snapshot (no source control history, that's confidential) posted to  
some obscure website when the hardware finally ships (and the dev  
team's broken up), and if you _do_ diff this obsolete thing against  
vanilla the diff is multiple megabytes and most of it wasn't our  
changes.

Intermittently getting paid to do that means I _don't_ qualify as a  
hobbyist, apparently. Even though the vast majority of actual open  
soruce programming I get done is in the downtime _between_ contracts.

(I'm listed in MAINTAINERS for trying to prevent documentation from  
falling through the cracks when nobody else merges it through their  
tree. I got paid to work on Linux documentation once, for a very nice 6  
months back in 2007, but I didn't get listed in MAINTAINERS until ~3  
years after that stopped.)

Rob