Direct from the Executive Director

The Economics

Earlier today, Linux Foundation member IBM announced its adoption of a new
corporate policy that will govern its global participation in the standards
development process. It also revealed a list of standards reform
recommendations generated through a discussion among 70 standards experts
from around the world, and called upon all stakeholders, from the open
source community, to vendors, to government, to academia, to join in a
dialogue that can both raise the bar for standards development as well as

Sometimes a consortium can play a smaller supportive role that is really powerful. Helping people and organizations to pull together in the same direction can accomplish amazing things. It’s very gratifying.

This week we saw news centered around two studies on desktop computing trends: one from Forrester Research and one from IDC. Both reports come from highly regarded firms and both seem to point to contradictory trends.

First let me state the obvious. If Google’s new browser is successful then the desktop operating system just became a lot less important. This is great news for Linux.

The Linux Foundation will be hosting our first ever End User Collaboration Summit this October in New York.

This forum is designed for sophisticated users of Linux who will be able share best practices about how they are using Linux and speak directly with the core developers of the Linux platform.

Declaring victory for the Linux desktop at the end of the day will based upon looking at market penetration of Linux based clients vs. Windows and other operating systems. I believe this is still the best measure but we may finally be able to declare this year the breakout of the Linux desktop.

When Apple launched the 3G iPhone, I must confess, I went out and purchased one. I need a smart phone for work, I need one that works both in the United States and Japan, and the consumer electronic design from Apple floored me. The screen is exquisite. The video playback is outstanding. The mobile web experience is second to none. I realize I am in a walled garden, but what a pretty walled garden it is.

While everyone is talking about the fact that Jerry Sienfled has signed up to pitch Microsoft Vista it is worth noting another ad campaign that Microsoft launched last week entitled the “Mojave Experiment.” This type of advertising goes back ages and is generally used to show people that they will actually like something that they thought they disliked. In other words Microsoft feels that Vista has a bad rap due to a lot of “FUD” in the market about Vista’s poor performance, lack of security, difficulty to use, etc.

Walking around Linuxworld this year it was interesting to see the number of Apple notebooks in the halls and various sessions. It wasn’t necessarily that there were more Apple notebooks than Linux machines, but it was a good number and begs the question: why do open source people seem to cut Apple some slack when it comes to their very closed proprietary platform?

LinuxWorld kicks off tomorrow in San Francisco. In many ways, it has a real “State of the Union” feel to it, being one of the oldest shows devoted exclusively to Linux technologies and business trends.

Intuit has joined in promoting Linux with their new Linux Business Resource web site. Intuit has clearly caught on to something we have known for some time. According to their web site:

Michael Arrington over at Techcrunch is throwing down the gauntlet to produce a “dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen web tablet to surf the web. Nothing fancy like the Dell latitude XT, which costs $2,500. Just a Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel. It doesn’t exist today, and as far as we can tell no one is creating one.

If you work around Linux regularly, in some ways the latest amazing news is… not that amazing. The New York Stock Exchange, where the world’s largest public companies trade their stocks, is now running on Linux. (Microsoft is not listed on the NYSE; they trade on the NASDAQ. Now *that* would have been a fun headline…) In addition the Chicago Mercantile Exchange also runs on Linux. While perhaps not as famous as the NYSE, the CME is one of the largest exchanges in the world. Even the Tokyo Stock Exchange is running on Linux.

It has been years since we have seen a full scale operating system war. Today’s announcement by Nokia that they will be open sourcing Symbian and making it available royalty free is the opening of yet another front in the blossoming mobile OS conflagration.

The New York Times reports today a hard rebuke from European Union’s competition commissioner, Neelie Kroes, against Microsoft’s tactics in Europe. In her speech she offered up some advice worth heeding; “I know a smart business decision when I see one — choosing open standards is a very smart business decision indeed,” Ms. Kroes told a conference in Brussels.

Open Source is still a disruptive idea. It has moved beyond that in server operating systems, of course, with Linux on 20% of servers shipped these days. That’s known as being “mainstream.” But the effects of open source development and business models continue to be heavily disruptive as they spread into new technology markets. Disruption often benefits consumers directly.

Cell phones are the next device that will move to open standards. Whether the big providers like it or not.

Next week the leaders of the Linux industry gather in Austin Texas for a meeting of the minds. The Linux Foundation has set up an invitational event where the folks who work directly on the business and technical issues facing the platform can get together and share ideas. We’ll find out about these questions and more:

CrunchGear » Archive » All About Linux 2008: Why use Linux? Interesting post from a developer who banks on the platform.

Explaining Open Source’s Exponential Growth - Blogs – ComputerworldUK blogs - The latest technology news & analysis on Outsourcing, HMRC data, Apple iPhone, Global warming, MySQL, Open Enterprise The most interesting thing about this study is they “are using “exponential” in its strict mathematical sense, not the loose hyperbolic one.