academia contribution to the kernel

[João Eduardo Luís]

On May 31, 2011, at 12:42 AM, Prasad Joshi wrote:

> On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 12:05 AM, Javier Martinez Canillas
> <martinez.javier at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hello,
>> 
>> A few days ago Greg k-h posted in his blog asking to send questions
>> that he could make in his interview with Linus at LinuxCon Japan.
>> Sadly his keynote is tomorrow so I'm a bit late to send him a question
>> I would like to ask Linus, key kernel developers and companies
>> sponsoring Linux development. Instead I will make the question in this
>> list to know what you people think about.
>> 
>> My question is: why academia contribution to the Linux kernel is negligible?
>> 
> 
> Leave contribution, frankly speaking academic experts lack the
> knowledge of many of new features. For example few days back I was
> speaking about virtualization with a professor in my University. She
> thought I am talking about "Virtual Reality" and started telling me
> the work she is doing, obviously I couldn't understand whatever she
> was blurring. When I joined the University, I used to talk with
> professors about ZFS, BTRFS but, to my surprise they had no idea about
> them.

Being a MSc student myself, and dealing with quite a lot of different people in the department, I must say that statement is like everything else in life: it is not nearly as true as it might appear. Generally speaking, one should not talk about systems with someone from the multimedia department, nor about kernel programming with the folks from the artificial intelligence department. For instance, one of my professors has a long history on file systems and he enjoys quite a lot spending entire afternoons sharing knowledge.

> 
>> In the last linux foundation report about who is sponsoring the Linux
>> kernel development, academia contribution was less than 1.5%.
>> 
>> Being involved in the academia as a PhD student I have my own
>> conclusions that are very similar to the ones exposed by Thomas
>> Gleixner in his lwn.net article "academia v. reality"
>> (http://lwn.net/Articles/397422/).
>> 
>> How can the Linux foundation and companies behind Linux improve this?
>> Academia has too much resources (both human and financial) that can be
>> used to improve Linux.
>> 
> 
> Academic people, I guess are evaluated using the number of papers they
> have published. I have not seen people publishing papers in Linux
> kernel development community. They are completely on opposite ends.
> 

I share most of this opinion, and I'll add to it.

At the moment, and to my knowledge, in my computer science department there are two on-going MSc thesis focused on Linux, one of them being mine. The thing about having a thesis based on a beast such as Linux, as my supervisor always points out, is that there is a lot of room to mess things up. If you mess it up, and given the thesis has a limited time-frame, you are unable to write (or even publish) any papers. This gets even worse whenever the on-going work is part of a bigger research project, which must deliver some sort of results.

Therefore, most of the academic work I'm acquainted with is fundamentally focused on providing proof-of-concept prototypes. On the field of File Systems there are quite a lot of published papers using Linux as their backbone, but most of the work is focused on providing some sort of research objective, and the implementation is presented as nothing but a PoC sustaining whatever it is that the paper claims. I'm rarely able to find a working implementation, publicly available. 

> Academics might not like to work on Linux kernel because of the Open
> Source. They are always concerned with funding, fear of not generating
> money out of open source projects might be another reason. If Linux
> foundation can provide research funding, Universities would be
> interested in working on Linux kernel.
> 

I'm not sure how it goes outside Portugal, but most projects I'm aware of seldomly care about this. Usually, projects are funded through our National Science and Technology Foundation (with government ties), or by EU funding. To my knowledge, there are no restrictions on which licenses are to be applied to research projects. In my opinion, being publicly financed research, it *should* be open sourced and subject to a public license, if not public domain all the way down. Then again, this is merely my opinion.


In a nutshell, I think most of the reason why academia don't develop on the kernel is because it survives on publications. The more you have, the more funding may come towards you. In order to develop to the kernel in a useful time-frame you require students/researchers who are used to do kernel programming. And my experience, though biased due to the current state of affairs in my university, dictates that we are in the Java era. Everybody knows Java, and few are those who care to learn any more C than the right amount to complete the couple of chairs in the course that actually requires such an 'archaic programming language' (as some of my colleagues enjoy pointing out, for whatever reason they fancy).


Cheers.
Joao

---
João Eduardo Luís
gpg key: 477C26E5 from pool.keyserver.eu 


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