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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."

3 of 51 comments (clear)

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

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

  2. 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.

  3. 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.