Intel: Samsung Clobbering Others With Tizen

There's a bit of a spat that started between Intel and Samsung developers working on the Tizen operating system.

This latest corporate food fight started when Intel's Arjan van de Ven noticed that the modern C-based Bootchart tool was replaced by a 2005 Java-version of Bootchart that is quite old and carries less features. The commit swapping out the modern Bootchart for the legacy Java Bootchart can be found here and happened back in August. The change was by Samsung's Kim Kibum.

Arjan van de Ven is a well known Intel Linux developer that has been involved with Bootchart among other open-source projects. Arjan publicly questioned this Tizen Bootchart change on the Tizen mailing list. He followed up a day later when no response had turned up and also asked whether Tizen is even using Gerrit for code review. After some basic responses, he followed up with more questions about this change of Bootchart.

As an explanation for the change, "He just dumped Tizen source code from Samsung internal git to public Tizen git. You know Tizen is largely based on Samsung Linux Platform."

Following those messages, Arjan renamed the thread to Samsung clobbering all of Intel/others work?? "btw, are you telling me that Samsung just basically clobbered all the work that the dozen of Intel Tizen folks did over the last, like 15 months?? And what about the other contributors to this Linux Foundation project? that not only sounds incredibly rude, it really sounds like bad business, clobbering millions of dollars of work from other companies like this; companies that are trying to work with Samsung."

No Samsung / Tizen developer has yet to respond to these latest allegations. The MeeGo-successor Linux operating system that focuses around web standards continues to be officially backed by the Linux Foundation, Intel, Samsung, Hawei, Orange, SK Telecom, Vodafone, and various other organizations.