News and thoughts from inside the Linux Foundation

We have a great sense of timing at the Linux Foundation. Who else would schedule a summit for large Linux users on Wall Street the day after “black Friday”? Actually we were worried that the news of the financial markets would distract our end users from attending the event. Luckily for us, this didn’t seem to be the case. (Jim Zemlin lightened the mood with a clever presentation you should check out here.)

On Wednesday kernel developer and Novell fellow Greg KH opened the first annual Linux Plumbers Conference with a keynote aimed squarely at the team behind Ubuntu, Canonical. I think Greg could have used the opportunity to inspire more than attack, but Greg obviously feels strongly about the necessity for upstream development. It’s also Greg being Greg: I believe he carries around a spoon just in case he encounters a hornets’ nest.

Does he have a point?

Earlier this year, at the urging of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board, I decided to create a new event: the Linux Foundation End User Summit. The intent is to combine a small group of large Linux users (generally on the server side) with core community Linux developers. The result will hopefully be technical innovation and knowledge sharing between those who use the software and those who develop it.

Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Ubuntu, recently wrote a post detailing Ubuntu and Canonical’s contributions to the upstream projects that make up their distributions. There he mentioned a challenge he recently issued to the Linux and free software community: build a Linux-based UI and computing experience on par with Apple’s within two years.

This morning my “ambient awareness” (meaning the passive awareness I have from my news feeds and contacts on Twitter and Facebook) is buzzing with Clive Thompson’s excellent article in yesterday’s New York Times.

So the bloggers over at ZDNet have once again proclaimed the end of the operating system. Larry Dignan says:

The operating system may be losing its luster. In fact, you could argue that the operating system–Linux, OS X and Windows–will become an application that just happens to boot first. And hardware vendors are on to the OS’s diminishing importance.

He goes on to say:

At the last Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, the late Joe Barr wrote up this exchange on day one of the conference:

Deb Gage at the San Francisco Chronicle recently profiled a voting machine that will be given a tryout at a mock election at Linux World, opening today. Attendees of the conference will have the ability to cast their vote for one of the two candidates on the US presidential ticket. Besides obvious political fervor of many open source devotees, what’s the connection between this machine and Linux?

I’m very pleased to welcome Brian Proffitt to the Linux Foundation. Brian will be serving as the community manager and editor for the Linux Developer Network. We’re extremely lucky to lure Brian away from Jupiter Media, where he built a thriving community and reported on Linux for such publications as Linux Today and Linux Planet.

The 8th Linux Foundation Japan Symposium took place last week in Tokyo.  The goal of these symposiums is to bring leading Linux luminaries to present and interact with local senior software developers, with the goal of increasing open source participation by talented Japanese developers and also fostering Linux usage in the Japanese IT industry.

Andrew Morton was on hand to speak about the status and direction of kernel development, covering kernel process material and specifically highlighting areas that need to be worked on including solid state disks and the linux-next tree.

Yesterday as I was sitting in a cafe having a drink, I caught up on my New York Times business section. In a review of the new class of Mini-Notebooks, I wasn’t surprised to see Linux mentioned. After all Linux is the dominant OS in these new class of computers, described by the Times as bigger than a smart phone but smaller than a laptop. While I wasn’t surprised to see Linux mentioned, I was surprised by my reaction.

A few weeks ago we posted video from the first day of our Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit as well as a dozen personal interviews with interesting folks who attended. (And believe me left out so many interesting people it’s painful to think about.) I’ve just been catching up on the personal ones, most of which taught me something new.

Last week, I recorded a podcast with Dennis Byron, analyst at eBizQ. Dennis wanted to talk about how open source is the fundamental enabler of Software as a Service, an idea he started writing about after a conversation with some guy named Jim Zemlin.

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In the past I have done media interviews with reporters who question if open source is good for a developers career. Basically they have the outdated notion that open source is for hobbyists and time off from “real jobs.” In reality, open source developers are much in demand. The kernel developers I know certainly have no shortage of job opportunities. Why?

"Man bites Dog.” It’s the classic example of how news works: editors pick the unexpected. Recently, Joe Barr from Linux.com wrote on his mixed feelings about attending the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. Specifically he mentioned disappointment that the desktop was not a central topic of discussion at the meeting. I think Joe is a good journalist and have enjoyed working with him on stories over the years. I also think Linux.com is a fantastic source of Linux content, both for articles and increasingly video.

“Man bites Dog.” It’s the classic example of how news works: editors pick the unexpected. Recently, Joe Barr from Linux.com wrote on his mixed feelings about attending the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. Specifically he mentioned disappointment that the desktop was not a central topic of discussion at the meeting. I think Joe is a good journalist and have enjoyed working with him on stories over the years. I also think Linux.com is a fantastic source of Linux content, both for articles and increasingly video.

Earlier this week at the first day of the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, VIA Technologies, a supplier of chipsets and x86 processors, announced they will be opening up their specifications and code to help open source developers support their components. This is significant news for Linux developers and most importantly Linux users who will see better support for the multitude of VIA components within PCs and mini-tops.

Or as SVN says:

We’re very happy to announce today that Adobe has joined the Linux Foundation as a member. I’m always happy to welcome new members of course and to recognize those companies who make a stand and commitment to paying Linus salary (amongst other things). But I’m especially happy because this is another point in our on-going case that Linux is the platform for Web 2.0 development today and cloud and cross-device development tomorrow.

One of the core mission’s of the Linux Foundation is to increase participation and adoption of Linux throughout the world, especially in areas not well integrated into the Linux ecosystem. We focus on developers first, because we feel local development leads to local adoption, especially as countries realize that Linux and the GPL allows them to build local software economies instead of shipping jobs and money to some other location (like Redmond, for instance.)

There’s been interesting debate going on recently on the future of applications: where they will be developed, how they will be delivered and on what platform.

On our last Linux Foundation Open Voices podcast, Mark Shuttleworth said: