Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Samsung's Open Source Group Is Growing, Hiring Developers

Posted by samzenpus on from the bigger-every-day dept.

jones_supa writes Almost two years ago, Samsung's open source team was just one person: Linux and FOSS advocate Ibrahim Haddad, head of the open source group at Samsung Research America. The new Open Source Innovation Group at Samsung is now 40 people strong, including 30 developers, devoted full-time to working on upstream projects and shepherding open source development into the company. The group is hiring aggressively and plans to double the size of the group in the coming years. Their first targets are project maintainers and key contributors to 23 open source projects that are integral to Samsung's products, including Linux, Gstreamer, FFmpeg, Blink, Webkit, EFL, and Wayland. They plan to eventually start hiring more junior open source developers as well. Just about every Samsung product, from phones and tablets to home appliances, uses open source software, said Guy Martin, senior open source strategist at Samsung. Martin also mentions the importance of funding: "You already see this in the Linux kernel, where most people who contribute are paid to contribute. And you'll see that more and more."

51 comments

  1. LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Yeah but then you have to work for Samsung. Isn't there any other place to work for? Like Roto Rooter?

    1. Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      EA is better choice.

    2. Re:LOL by ewilts · · Score: 4, Informative

      You have to realize that Samsung Electronics - which is only part of the Samsung group - has about 250,000 employees. As with any company this big, there's going to be a collection of good teams to work in and a (hopefully smaller) collection of not-so-good teams to work in. There are going to be communication breakdowns where the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing. No big company is immune to this. Find a good group with a good manager in any company and you'll be happy. Find a bad manager in an otherwise good company and you'll be miserable.

      I work in the Samsung Austin R & D Center where we design CPUs for mobile devices. I love it here - an awesome work environment, awesome people, and excellent benefits because of Samsung's size, even though our building only has about 300 people in it. We have people here contributing to open source projects even though they're not part of the open source team that this article is referring to.

      --
      .../Ed
    3. Re:LOL by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 1

      I work in the Samsung Austin R & D Center where we design CPUs for mobile devices. I love it here - an awesome work environment, awesome people, and excellent benefits because of Samsung's size, even though our building only has about 300 people in it. We have people here contributing to open source projects even though they're not part of the open source team that this article is referring to.

      I live in Austin and know quite a few people that worked for Samsung in town. It was almost universally hated as anything but a springboard to a better job. Even the many reviews on sites like Glassdoor back this up.

    4. Re:LOL by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You sound like those whiny little shits in that epically crap "film" Antitrust. Like them, you just whine and whine and expect to be able to survive without any kind of income. Hopefully someone will beat you to death like they did to the chinkoid piece of shit in the "film".

    5. Re:LOL by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 1

      One of the major problems with working for Samsung in, say, Austin is that the local managers have no say at all. All the decisions come from South Korea. It really is supposed to be a miserable place to work for other than to gain the experience to move anywhere else.

    6. Re:LOL by ewilts · · Score: 2

      > One of the major problems with working for Samsung in, say, Austin is that the local managers have no say at all. All the decisions come from South Kore

      100% BS, at least for my Samsung office. Some decisions, yes, like any other satellite company office where decisions come from "corporate" or "headquarters". Sure, major purchases get approved in Korea, but I get them approved significantly faster here than at my last job where I was in the same friggin' building as the folks doing the approving.

      Again, there are MULTIPLE Samsung facilities in Austin. YMMV.

      --
      .../Ed
  2. Listen by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    You don't hire to make open source. You hire those to USE open source. A lot cheaper to hire maintenance than to hire those who create.

  3. I'll just leave this right here... by Culture20 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    http://news.slashdot.org/story...

    1. Re:I'll just leave this right here... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Or even "Samsung Smart TV: Basically a Linux Box Running Vulnerable Web Apps"
      http://entertainment.slashdot.org/story/13/08/03/2250247/samsung-smart-tv-basically-a-linux-box-running-vulnerable-web-apps

  4. Yes, there is. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    EVIL: A Growth Industry!

    We're ALWAYS hiring.

  5. Make drivers open by NotInHere · · Score: 4, Informative

    and make it possible to use your smartphones with OS'es other than yours. That should also include your stylus input, for which you are currently market leader. I'd have almost bought one of your devices, but when I found out CM doesn't support it because of driver problems I gave it back.

    1. Re:Make drivers open by xtronics · · Score: 1

      Or even better - use coreboot with open drivers.

    2. Re:Make drivers open by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I'm sure they kick themselves every day for the ones of sales they lose to people like yourself.

    3. Re:Make drivers open by Spy+Handler · · Score: 3, Funny

      and make TouchWiz open too. That way you can run TouchWiz on Nexus and HTC and LG phones!

    4. Re:Make drivers open by NotDrWho · · Score: 1

      Make drivers open and make it possible to use your smartphones with OS'es other than yours. That should also include your stylus input, for which you are currently market leader.

      Yeah, well, Samsung REALLY wanted to endanger their cash cow by doing all that...I mean they REALLY did, man. They went on and on about how much they really wanted to just do it.

      But Jim said "no."

      Now, keep in mind that Samsung fully feels your pain. And just between Samsung and you, they acknowledge that Jim is a mega-dick and all. But that's just the way it is, you know. But Samsung does thank you for your purchase, and still wants to remain bros.

      --
      SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
    5. Re:Make drivers open by exomondo · · Score: 1

      What benefit would they get for all the work of re-writing Qualcomm's proprietary drivers for every component?

    6. Re:Make drivers open by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Ones of extra sales.

    7. Re:Make drivers open by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Make drivers open

      Most of their hardware comes from 3rd parties like Qualcomm so what benefit would Samsung get in producing open drivers for Qualcomm's baseband hardware, GPU, etc? Why cant the open source community do that instead? If you want open drivers then ask Qualcomm for them instead or produce some decent open hardware.

      The free/open source software movement has always seemed a little misguided starting at the operating system level, it should have started at the bottom, not in the middle. That is produce open source hardware, for which it would be easy to produce open source drivers upon which you can run an open source operating system and open source applications. After decades we still just have an open source operating system and flogging the dead horse on trying to compel hardware manufacturers to provide open source drivers for their proprietary hardware.

      Create some decent open source hardware to prove the model is even viable, then perhaps vendors will embrace it.

    8. Re:Make drivers open by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That would require doing something other than whiningb

    9. Re:Make drivers open by ChunderDownunder · · Score: 1

      Samsung? little, it's more for the FOSS tinkerer concerned with binary blobs that don't always work between OS revisions.

      phones based on the Qualcomm SoC seem of little interest to the GNU replicant crowd due to the sheer number of binary blobs.

      Freedreno seems to have some progress behind it based on a Gallium3D stack but afaik no one has deployed it on Android. The benefit being porting the latest Lollipop to an unsupported 3 year old handset rather than dumping it to landfill when its 24 month contract expires.

    10. Re:Make drivers open by exomondo · · Score: 1

      Samsung? little, it's more for the FOSS tinkerer concerned with binary blobs that don't always work between OS revisions.

      Right, which answers the question of why they don't do it.

      The benefit being porting the latest Lollipop to an unsupported 3 year old handset rather than dumping it to landfill when its 24 month contract expires.

      No, Google Play Services was created so you could run the latest applications with the latest features without having to update the operating system, that was the whole point of it. It's not garbage just because it can't run the latest OS.

    11. Re:Make drivers open by rdnetto · · Score: 1

      Open source hardware isn't viable, though, at least not in its own right. You need to make profit somewhere, and it's usually one of software, hardware, or support. The SoC manufacturers sell hardware - if they just gave it away by open sourcing it, they'd lose their biggest source of revenue. Pretty much all the open source hardware in existence is either bought by a small segment of zealots (e.g. any of the attempts at a completely FOSS tablet), or is sold as a loss leader (e.g. Sparkfun open sources the designs for their breakout boards, because they also sells the parts for them).

      --
      Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
  6. GAY SEX: A Growth Industry! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Let em all commie pinko liberals talk you into gay sex it's better than it sounds and who cares about them men they're all ugly so you don't have to pick

  7. Open source to create walled gardens? by CptJeanLuc · · Score: 1

    I recently replaced my problem-ridden Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini with a Motorola Moto G, and the switch has been pure joy despite lower spec and a low quality camera. But gone are all the Samsung customizatons, the extra apps that came with the phone which you could not be sure whether you could uninstall, and the annoying Samsung account. I would be more enthusiastic about their open source efforts if they built less cumbersome products, rather than taking stock Android and adding layers of unneeded and unwanted stuff - just so they can "own the customer" by bringing them into their own ecosystem.

    1. Re:Open source to create walled gardens? by gstoddart · · Score: 2

      just so they can "own the customer" by bringing them into their own ecosystem.

      Sadly, that's where companies have decided is where the real money comes from.

      Everybody bitches about Apple's walled garden. And every other company is trying to build their own.

      If you can control the places where your users go to buy music, or movies, or where the advertising comes from ... well, you get a steady cash supply.

      "Brand Differentiation" and "monetization" is where it's at. And you can't do that with a stock version of Android if you're not Google.

      Mobile devices and the stuff people do with them has become the new cash cow. I don't see that changing. And everybody wants in on that action.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    2. Re:Open source to create walled gardens? by vux984 · · Score: 1

      I recently replaced my problem-ridden Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini with a Motorola Moto G, and the switch has been pure joy despite lower spec and a low quality camera.

      Meh... my mom has one, and I don't care for it. I prefer my Galaxy. I like the tactileness of the home button for one thing.

      But gone are all the Samsung customizatons, the extra apps that came with the phone which you could not be sure whether you could uninstall, and the annoying Samsung account.

      Meh. I agree. The S5 is a bit schizophrenic due to having both googles crap AND samsungs crap preloaded. But at the end of the day, you seem to presume that I should prefer Google's crap. I generally don't.

      I like google maps more than the alternatives, and I use the email app* (but not the gmail app); and I mostly use non-stock stuff for the rest.

      I heard in lollipop they've gotten rid email and all that's left is gmail (??) and if so I'll be looking for a new mail app too after I upgrade, because I hate the 'gmail app' even when using it with gmail accounts.

      I would be more enthusiastic about their open source efforts if they built less cumbersome products, rather than taking stock Android and adding layers of unneeded and unwanted stuff - just so they can "own the customer" by bringing them into their own ecosystem.

      Can you blame them for not wanting to do all that work of selling and maintaining a phone just so they can hand you over to google for all future revenue?

      I don't much care for the samsung ecosystem, but I have no lover for the google one either. and when push comes to shove I'd rather have both of them vying for my attention than just being fed into one or other. (And this is why I don't use an iphone anymore.)

    3. Re:Open source to create walled gardens? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      buy music, or movies

      LOL wut?

      Seriously, if this is all a walled garden is for, they're way off target.

    4. Re:Open source to create walled gardens? by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

      I bought a Moto G for my wife last week. Very impressed. Very. Especially with the price.

      --
      When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  8. Not if the software affects your business by raymorris · · Score: 3, Interesting

    For a company like Samsung, the software stack used in their phones is very important to them. Kernel support for BLE, for example, affects their revenue. A couple of paid programmers can have significant influence on a software stack that is behind BILLIONS is revenue for Samsung. They'd be incredibly stupid to sit their and let other companies have 100% control of the software they rely on rather than spend a thousands of dollars to protect and expand their billions in revenue.

    As an example, my predecessor was a system administrator. He spent his days maintaining the system, compiling data from the system into reports, working around issues with the system, and helping other users maintain their projects on the system, compile reports they need from data on the system, etc.

    I'm a developer of the system, not a maintainer. I don't compile reports we need each month, I write a module once which AUTOMATICALLY generates the report when it's needed. I don't have a routine of constantly explaining to users how to work around a limitation in the system, I fix the limitation. Compared to the old way of doing things, having an admin for the system, I probably save my employer several times my salary each year. There is basically no cost to my employer because previously they were already paying someone to administer the system. For the same pay, I administer AND develop the system to better fit their needs. Part of that development work consists of eliminating the need to do much adminstration work.

  9. They need to update their web site by Alain+Williams · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I needed to replace my printer recently, I looked around for something that would work with CentOS 6 and the price of ink per page was reasonable. I was looking at a Samsung one - no mention of Linux; by the time that they replied to an email (10 days later) I had bought an HP multi function printer. So: they lost a sale because they could not be bothered to document what they had done.

    The HP web site was excellent, each model of printer and what was supported by a wide variety of Linux distros. Unfortunately: I could not make it work, the support people said that it was a s/ware fault and then refused to do anything about it: https://answers.launchpad.net/hplip/+question/255970

    I sent the HP printer back and then bought a Brother printer - no problem, worked once I downloaded the driver.

    1. Re:They need to update their web site by gstoddart · · Score: 1

      The HP web site was excellent
      LOL, you're lying ... HP hasn't had a decent customer facing website in years. ;-)

      It's like they've designed the most cumbersome/least useful web pages they could given existing technology.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    2. Re:They need to update their web site by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Oh no! They lost a $99 sale? I'm sure they were in utter panic mode upon hearing that!!

    3. Re:They need to update their web site by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      Brother has excellent linux support and puts lots of features in that everyone else nickle-and-dimes you for.

      Buy any Brother networked laser printer and you'll likely be able to print from any unix-like system with no drivers. They support /all/ of the networked printing standards out of the box from LPD to google cloud print. Just point a browser at your printer's IP address and be amazed at the pages of features you can configure.

      Hell, the models with scanners can be configured for scan to FTP. Want to scan? Set up an FTP server. Who the fuck needs drivers? Don't want to do FTP? How about TFTP or SMTP right to a mail server?

      The DCP-L2540DW is 100 bucks on amazon and it supports all of that. Mind boggling, isn't it?
      http://www.brother-usa.com/MFC/ModelDetail/4/DCPL2540DW/

      Yeah, the toner is pricy (Brother is cheaper than it's competitors but its still not cheap) but but if you're like me you only need to print once a month the utility is worth the price.

      I had a 6 year old brother wireless laser printer but I recently purchased another one. The old one worked fine, but the newer models support google cloud print and have apps for iOS and Android that let you print from your mobile devices.

    4. Re:They need to update their web site by danomac · · Score: 1

      I don't trust that hplip with work anymore with printers on their own compatibility list.

      I have a cp1025nw that I bought a while back and it was working fine. Somewhere along the way, in one of the new versions, hplip refused to load the firmware for my printer. It says it's loaded but it doesn't, it asks to install firmware again when printing. Manually compiling the old version worked with no issues. I recently forgot about this and upgraded and found my printer in its non-working state again.

      I discovered foo2zjs which happens to support my printer. No drama installing it either, add a print queue and the damn thing just works. None of this hp-setup crap. Removing and readding printers every time there's an update crap.

      Why does printing on linux have to be such a pain in the ass?

    5. Re:They need to update their web site by MeNeXT · · Score: 2

      Yeah, the toner is pricy (Brother is cheaper than it's competitors but its still not cheap) but but if you're like me you only need to print once a month the utility is worth the price.

      Refill your own and the price drops considerably. Buy a kit http://www.inkowl.com/index.php?p=product&product=3408 to reuse your cartridges. By installing this kit on my printer I am still using the original toner. It's been over a year and over 3000 color pages printed. There is a lot more toner in those cartridges than you think.

      --
      DRM? No thanks, I'll just get it somewhere else...
    6. Re:They need to update their web site by Zontar+The+Mindless · · Score: 1

      My distro (OpenSUSE) has included HP drivers and HP's print job manager since forever. Detected my DeskJet 1050A printer/scanner/copier and offered to set it up as soon as I plugged in the USB cable and powered up the printer. Setup and printing a test page took about 3 minutes. Has worked flawlessly ever since.

      CentOS is nice for a server or testbed but I don't think I'd run it as a full-time desktop.

      --
      Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
    7. Re:They need to update their web site by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Your choices seem odd to me...

      Usually I would assume if you inquired about the samsung, then it was obviously on the short list. For them to have "lost a sale" they would need to have been your number 1 choice if they had replied.

      They didn't reply so you went with (presumably) your second choice HP. You found out that didn't work and sent it back (knowing returns processes, it is unlikely for you to have completed this before samsung emailed back).

      Then you went with the Brother.

      So samsung therefore weren't your number 1 choice, so they never really lost a sale.

  10. IP Stack for everyone by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    I can't wait until someone hacks my oven and burns my turkey.

  11. Samsung's own firmware/software ready to improve? by Mostly+a+lurker · · Score: 1

    I have long respected both Samsung's commitment to R&D and the general quality of their hardware. Unfortunately, they have never quite managed to couple this with well thought out firmware and software. I hope they are intending to package best in class open source components with an intelligent framework. If so, I am sure the quality of their offerings will improve markedly.

  12. Too bad they're in Silicon Valley... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    They used to have Richardson, TX offices, and I could've worked there.

  13. What by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Samsung wants to learn to do software now? Last time I checked, all their apps looked like they were done in Flash by someone making a living doing flashy myspace/geocities style pages. Also, judging by performance, it was the lowest bidder.

  14. Samsung will never be good at software by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Samsung is first and foremost and hardware manufacturer: LED displays, memory, SoC chips etc.

  15. Unfortunately... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Unfortunately, Samsung's open source group is headed by an idiot PHB with no community cred. If you can live with that, then by all means join and bask in some of that Android megabuck glow. But if you can't abide idiots and you do have talent, don't waste your time.

  16. Join the Tizen trainwreck by Tough+Love · · Score: 1

    You know, Tizen is like Anrdoid, but more open than Android. Really. Samsung's open source group totally made that happen.

    </sarcasm>

    --
    When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
  17. Join the Tizen trainwreck by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You know, Tizen is like Anrdoid, but more open than Android. Really. Samsung's open source group totally made that happen.

    </sarcasm>

    Check your facts Tough Love - the OSG was formed *after* Tizen was created, and as a matter of fact, Guy Martin helped create the more open governance model for Tizen 3.0, which is almost like a completely separate project. It would be great if more products were based on Tizen 2.x, but yes, that branch is more like Android.

    I also think you overestimate how much influence a team of 40 can have in a company the size and complexity of Samsung.

  18. Unfortunately... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Unfortunately, Samsung's open source group is headed by an idiot PHB with no community cred. If you can live with that, then by all means join and bask in some of that Android megabuck glow. But if you can't abide idiots and you do have talent, don't waste your time.

    Sounds like you might a little bitter and didn't fit in with the rest of the team working hard to change perceptions....