I met Agustin Benito Bethencourt during FOSDEM 2013 and we discussed Open Source software. Recently he moved to Linaro, one of the most promising and important Open Source projects, so we talked to him to understand his role at Linaro and to learn more about what Linaro does. Read on….
Swapnil Bhartiya: You come from SUSE/KDE e.V. so how is the transition or how does the prior experience work here?
Agustin Benito Bethencourt: Driving the openSUSE Team at SUSE has been very valuable. The experience I got there, making compatible the company and the community interests, is going to be important throughout my career. My previous experience as ASOLIF Manager Director is helping me a lot too. They have a lot in common. Both, Linaro and ASOLIF are business ecosystems (non-profits), both have a strong Free Software culture, are heavily distributed environments…
But most of what I know about Free Software communities and working in the open I learnt it in KDE. I wouldn’t have a chance to join Linaro otherwise. KDE is a first class learning ecosystem, and not just in pure technical areas. It has been, it is, the most important professional and personal experience I’ve had, together with my years as an entrepreneur back in the Canary Islands, Spain.
SB: What will be your role at Linaro?
ABB: I am Director of the Core Development Group. I direct four engineering teams: kernel, power management, security and virtualization. All together makes around fifty engineers. Some of them are Linaro employees and some others are assignees, that is, engineers employed by our members but working with us full time. We mostly work upstream, developing and maintaining technologies that our members are interested in. We also develop features requested by other Linaro Groups or specific members. Core Development engineering teams are heavily involved in FLOSS communities, especially in the Linux Kernel.
Linaro is growing fast so I am currently focused on management and development processes. Together with the technical leads and the project managers, my goal is to keep high levels of efficiency within the Group while growing, keeping the Free Software culture that has made Linaro so successful.
SB: Can you tell us a bit about Linaro? What do they do and how are they associated with Free Software and Linux?
ABB: As I mentioned, Linaro is a four-year old ecosystem of corporations collaborating around a non-profit organization. Our main focus is GNU/Linux and Android on ARM. In summary, Linaro does:
* Development. Most of it takes place, or is pushed, upstream, in a variety of FLOSS communities.
* Products (in the FLOSS sense). We release software on a regular basis that is used by our members and the community, for many different purposes. Check for instance our Linaro Stable Kernel (LSK).
* Services to our members, taking advantage of the expertise we get working on the two previous areas. Testing our software in members hardware is one of them. There are many more.
Probably most people know us for our work in the Linux Kernel community and Android (ASOP), but we do many other things. Currently Linaro has more than 200 engineers.
SB: Android often doesn’t get credit for a fully Open Source project as AOSP. From what I see it fully adheres to the 4 freedoms FSF talks about and it has enabled competitors like Amazon to create competing platforms, what is your opinion about it?
ABB: Free Software used to be black or white. Now there is a lot of grey. It is the consequence of becoming mainstream. Android has opened, to some extent,
