Looks like Heise picked up my last message about the meeting at OSDL. Nice to see that.

Anyway, I wrote up a huge rant about the meeting that we had last Thursday, but after getting it all out, I deleted it and felt a bit better.

So here's a much shorter and safe-for-work summary, the good and the bad of the meeting:

Good:

• I was wrong, the Japan companies were not making a layer that binary drivers could be created with. OSDL properly told them that this was not a good thing to do, and they changed their proposal.

Bad:

• OSDL's technical management did not provide full disclosure to me about what the situation was going into the meeting. I went in with the impression that they had done everything they could to handle the situation and we were brought in as a last resort. In fact, this was not the case.
• They depended on me, and another non-OSDL kernel developer to tell the Japan members what the error of their thinking was, instead of doing it themselves, hence wasting the Japan member's time, as well as making the kernel community look like a bunch of heavy-handed people.

Here's the presentation that was delivered at the meeting. It didn't get past the 3rd slide, before we moved off to discussing the main reasons behind their problems (which is a topic for another time.)

I do not want to deal with OSDL's technical management again after what happened here.

posted Mon, 07 Nov 2005 in [/linux]