Looking At The Linux Kernel

A reader writes: "Some folks from The Boston Consulting Group with OSDN have been working on creating a visual representation of the Linux Kernel. It's been put online, complete with instructions with how to read it, and how to make sense of the information." There's also some new code checked into the Free Code Graphing Project, which enabled this to project to come together (look at CVS) - let's see if we can get people to do it with things like *BSD, Apache and some of the other great projects out there. This is a continuation with the other work being done, like the OSS demographic work. (Note: Slashdot is part of OSDN.) Karim Lakhani, progenitor in many ways of the project also commented: "The kernelmap shows beautifully the inherent modularity of the Linux Kernel. We think modularity of the source code is one of the important strategic advantages that the Linux Community has and we wanted to move beyond a magnifying glass on the kernel map poster to make it browsable and to let the community add new features. We hope that this can become a tool for navigating the kernel and learning more about how it works. Rusty Russel and Martin Pool did an incredible job creating the map and transforming it into html."

Comments

I'd love to see a marketer put THAT up

[dpbsmith]

on a whiteboard. You know, the guys that love to draw rectangles and clouds and arrows and boxes sitting on top of other boxes and call it an "architecture."

I'll be damned

[dr_dank]

There really is a penguin at the center of the kernel!

BCG? Why?

[sphealey]

BCG is one of the classic management strategy consulting organizations. Typically that type of consultant comes in and recommends that you fire all your current technology people and replace whatever you have (Unix, AS/400, Novell) with the most expensive and complex products on the market (later they will recommend that you outsource everything to one of their "partners").

For the last 10 years the "most expensive and complicated" option has been Microsoft, and that is what the consultants have pushed.

Why would BCG be involved in Linux???? There is no percentage in it for them - or is there? Help me understand here.

sPh

Wow!

[DeltaSigma]

I finally found something more overwhelming than HTML 4.01 (transitional) validation of Microsoft's website.

Re:BCG? Why?

[jarit0z]

First a disclaimer: I've worked for the past three years at BCG. BCG's core business is not IT consulting (as IBM, for example) but business strategy. That means that our recommendations are usually not centered around any particular technology infrastructure, nor do we usually work with the IT department of our clients. Instead our recommendations focus on ways to increase the competitive advantage of our clients, some of the time that competitive advantage is reached through harnessing a new business model or a new way to organize around the work that needs to be done. Open Source is an active area of interest inside BCG mainly because it represents an innovative way to organize people to meet a goal. There has been an active mailing list discussing Open Source topics and how they apply to our clients needs for quite some time, also this is not the first collaboration of BCG with the movement, the results of a survey amongst sourceforge members conducted by BCG can be found here .