Guy Martin Guy Martin is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff within Motorola's Mobile Devices business. He helped establish opensource.motorola.com and works with groups inside of Motorola to better interface with the open-source community. Guy will present "Open Source, Motorola and You" at the upcoming MOTODEV Summits in London and Beijing. MOTODEV recently caught up with Guy and asked him a few questions about his session and about Motorola's open-source efforts.

Q. Why is your session important, and what will attendees learn?

A. My session provides an overview of where Motorola stands with regard to its open-source efforts. This has potential impact on all developers who build applications for any Motorola device or product. Attendees should come away with an understanding of where we are in the lifecycle of open source at Motorola. Additionally, we are interested in a dialogue with attendees on areas they see for Motorola to improve its open-source community interaction.

Q. Why is open source right for mobile developers?

A. Open source potentially allows all developers — not just those developing for mobile — to work with open-source components of Motorola products. With the right contribution model, this would let developers interested in these components make tangible contributions to our products. Also, from Motorola’s perspective, this ability to tap into the collective wisdom of the open-source community has obvious benefits, such as extra eyes looking for bugs, as well as fresh ideas that approach problems from a different perspective.

Q. What sorts of projects can developers find on opensource.motorola.com?

A. Right now, there are three types of projects on opensource.motorola.com:

• "One-way" pushes of code in our devices (A1200, RAZR 2 V8, ROKR Z6, etc.) to meet the license requirements of the GPL (GNU public license)
• "Semi-private" projects, such as our Java JSR and MIDP work, which have Expert Group communities that collaborate on specifications
• "Two-way" interaction projects, such as Gatling (our Java test framework) and the A1200 translations effort

The predominant type of project right now is the one-way push, since that was the early beachhead that the site was designed for. We hope to increase the number of “two-way” interaction projects in the future.

Q. How does your open-source work relate to the work undertaken in MOTOMAGX?

A. Since a large portion of the MOTOMAGX platform is based upon open-source components, there is an obvious connection with the work we're doing. Right now, that connection is mainly in the form of making sure we can quickly release modified open-source code as required by the GPL. We are still in the early stages of determining how we get the two-way component of community interaction going with MOTOMAGX. We have a unique opportunity to leverage a ready and willing community that wants to work on core components. The biggest challenge is finding areas of overlapping needs, skills and interests for both Motorola and the community.

Q. In two years, if we were to ask you about what’s new on opensource.motorola.com, what would that be?

A. Two years is an eternity in the open-source world. My hope and goal is that in two years' time, we will have significantly increased the number of two-way interaction projects on the site. In order to make this a reality, there is a lot of work — legal, cultural, technical — to be done by many people inside of Motorola, which, as a large company, tends to move at a slower pace than the open-source community. However, this is the kind of challenge that keeps me coming into work each day. With perseverance, I believe we can get there.

Q. Tell us about the different open-source projects Motorola is involved with.

A. There is a full list of the open-source projects we are involved in on the opensource.motorola.com site. I would, however, like to highlight a couple of good examples of the work we are trying to do with the community:

• Gstreamer. We have given back performance improvements and bug fixes to this open-source multimedia framework.
• Precise Process Accounting. We created this carrier-grade CPU scheduling and accounting package to help root-cause issues with embedded Linux in network switches, and we have made it available to the open-source community under GPL via a Sourceforge.net project.

Q. How can open-source developers partner with Motorola on future open-source efforts?

A. Right now, the best way is to contribute to the discussion around what you'd like to see from Motorola in this space. We are still in the early days of developing the overall strategy of how we work with the community. We want to hear from open-source developers and other community members as we move forward with our efforts. We have set up a forum on opensource.motorola.com to capture this feedback and to respond with our comments and thoughts. This is available under the feedback link on the main page of the site. We look forward to the community's comments!