looking east

Linux Developer Symposium China 2008 was really cool. I got to meet plenty of people including Chinese Linux developers, members of the BLUG, and the Linux Foundation.

The conference started off with a full day of talks, followed by a second day with discussions. Topics included everything Linux, like File System, Desktop, Mobile Linux, and Linux Challenges for the future. A large number of talks and discussions were actually concerned with mobile Linux, a topic that is of interest to a large number of people and companies in China. Another recurring issue were device drivers and their integration into the Linux public kernel. This, of course, has been a central topic in the Linux community for a while, and it seems that quite a few companies in China are maintaining their own device drivers privately without contributing them to the public kernel, even though this would considerably decrease long-term maintenance costs.

There is plenty happening in terms of Open Source in China. At the conference, many of the large software companies were present and showed considerable interest in China and Open Source. However, even despite government support and business representations, there seems to be only little contribution to Open Source projects in China so far. This will probably be changing and I believe that we will see some quite impressive Open Source stuff going on in China in the near future.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 21st, 2008 at 1:06 pm and is filed under asia, academic, computing, community, event, linux.