Dave McAllister (SGI) on Linux and Chilli

Mintslice writes "Dave McAllister, SGI's Directory of Technical Strategy has been touring Australia recently. The Age is running this story about comments he made at at local LUG (LUV). It runs over SGI's intentions for Linux, what they're doing to help development, what this means for marketing at SGI, and a treasure trove of bits and pieces including Chilli Recipes. Something for everyone. "

Comments

Open-source community not a good innovator?

[Morgaine]

The statement that the open-source community is not a good innovator is, like most complex issues, both true and untrue.

On the one hand, only the most blind of observers would suggest that novel products are not emerging from that quarter. The sheer volume of announcements on Freshmeat is just flabbergasting, and scattered like jewels in among the 95% of fairly ordinary stuff are some really excellent software products and many priceless ideas.

But on the other hand, and maybe this is where SGI is coming from, innovation in the Linux kernel is comparatively minimal. I don't think anyone would go so far as to say that it is stifled, but the fact remains that the choice of which ideas are accepted into the official release and which are not is in the hands of a very few people (maybe three or four, or possibly just the one). That must have an effect on innovation, however much we respect the people in question.

As a little example of the above, the DIPC project implemented a gem of an idea (I have absolutely nothing to do with it, by the way): allowing processes that communicate through System V IPC mechanisms on a single host to do so even if they are on different machines, while maintaining 100% compile-time application compatibility because the only difference at the API is a single bit in the IPC headers which you'd flick off or on for single or multiple machine operation. That's innovation, usefulness and elegance rolled into one. But no, Linus didn't want to put it into the standard kernel, and to say that the developers were greatly dispirited is the understatement of the year.

It's worth reflecting that if a kernel facility isn't part of the standard distribution, or worse, if it's available only as a patch, then for all intents and purposes it doesn't exist. We musn't get ourselves into a situation where innovation in the Linux kernel suffers as a result of this possibility.