FIRST I am NOT proposing you turn the beer event into a political demonstration. I do strongly encourage you to go there to have FUN. That’s what I will do. I will be there. Wearing my Fedora. So if you want to flame me for what I say, let’s do it face to face.

SECOND The fact that the developers working on the Android kernel parts seemingly (as pointed out by Greg Kroah-Hartman) have problems with upstreaming their patches is an alarming signal for the Linux community. I hope that Google shows us that I am wrong and they are willing to upstream their changes.

THIRD My call for saying “No, Thanks” to the beer is a pun directing to RMS famous quotes on comparing free beer and free speech.

So in closing: Geez, peeps! FOSDEM is about having fun *and* exchanging opinions. We should have both.

The unique opportunity that a lot of Open Source and Free Software minded people meet at FOSDEM could be a strong signal towards Google that we are there to *help* making things better.

So grab your beer, have fun and flame me if needed. If you want to throw your frustration and anger on me – fine. But I would prefer if you use that energy to get more Android patches upstream.

Deal?

UPDATE

This mail shows you that Google wants to get stuff upstream but ATM (that was in october last year) is limited in doing so..

We (Google) definitely want to get back in sync with mainline (as I’ve mentioned earlier in this or a related thread), and we’re planning on snapping up our kernel trees to 2.6.32+ once we get past various deadlines in the near future.