How Software Is Built, un blog forum dedicato all’analisi dei modelli di sviluppo software, ha fatto e pubblicato una bella, lunga intervista a Greg Kroah-Hartman (blog e Wikipage), storico sviluppatore del kernel Linux e maintainer di diversi subsystem.

L’intervista ha come argomento l’organizzazione e la gestione del source code, topic più che rilevante considerata la moltitudine di persone che scrive codice per il kernel di Linux, sia per passione che per lavoro.

To give an example, for the 2.5 to 2.6 kernel development series, which took about two years, the top 30 people did 80 percent of the work. Now, the top 30 people do 30 percent of the work. The sheer number of developers has also increased. We were running a couple hundred developers, and now we’re running a couple thousand.

Con un tasso di crescita del genere è molto interessante capire come il processo di sviluppo viene gestito, e come lo sviluppo stesso sia cambiato nel tempo.

Altrettanto interessante è il concetto di fiducia (trust) da parte di Linus e dei vari maintaners:

As I said, I maintain the subsystems such as USB, and I have people who I trust enough that if they send me a patch, I’ll take it, no questions asked. Because the most important thing is I know that they will still be around in case there’s a problem with it.And then I send stuff off to Linus. So, Linus trusts 10 to 15 people, and I trust 10 to 15 people. And I’m one of the subsystem maintainers. So, it’s a big, giant web of trust helping this go on.

Greg Kroah-Hartman porta avanti anche un’altra iniziativa, il Linux Driver Project, progetto atto a facilitare il porting e/o la scrittura di device driver per quelle aziende che desiderano rendere i propri prodotti HW fruibili anche da una utenza non Windows.

The Linux Driver Project started out because of the perception that Linux doesn’t support many devices. It turns out that Linux supports all devices out there. There’s really nothing manufactured today that Linux doesn’t support, in a major consumer market. There are some one-offs, like some small video-capture devices I know of that we don’t have support for, but people are actually working on those. The initial goal of the Linux Driver Project was to remove all barriers that could possibly be there, which were mostly managerial. To attain that goal, we said that we will write and maintain any driver for free for any company.

Qui sotto il link all’intervista completa

Interview with Greg Kroah-Hartman – Linux Kernel Dev/Maintainer.

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[tags]linux, kernel, Greg Kroah-Hartman[/tags]