Linux Foundation to be more like Apache
Summary: So the big story of The Linux Foundation turns out, in a way, to be smaller than it appeared this morning. It's a technical group whose legal and publicity assets belong to the community that sponsors it, and not to any small group of members.
Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation, says his vision for the group is to make it like Apache, or Mozilla, or Eclipse. The CEA is right out.
And anyone can use the penguin.
Zemlin comes to this work from the software industry, having worked at Covalent and then the Free Standards Group before the latter merged with OSDL today to create the Linux Foundation. He's not a veteran of the trade association game, groups like the Consumer Electronics Association which have grown enormously wealthy and influential through sponsoring trade shows like CES.
What he wants to do is run both face-to-face technical forums and online groups, as the founding organizations have been doing, and represent the industry as it tries to fight the FUD.
"We'll continue to be a member funded organization," he said. "The important thing is to keep offering high quality services that can be used by a broader set of constituents, so more people underwrite the organization."
Those services do include ongoing work on the Linux Standards Base, and the interoperability challenges meant to unify versions of Linux so it runs applications more like its proprietary rivals.
Zemlin's goals as industry spokesman are similarly modest.
"Acting as a spokesperson to counter FUD, absolutely. We're going to correct factual errors in defense of this platform. Are we going to act as a spokesman for open source community members? There are some extraordinary people in this movement. I wouldn't even begin to speak for these people."
So the big story of The Linux Foundation turns out, in a way, to be smaller than it appeared this morning. It's a technical group whose legal and publicity assets belong to the community that sponsors it, and not to any small group of members.
If in three years you know it as well as you do Mozilla or Apache, Jim Zemlin will be pleased. No one is trying to take over the open source world, he says.
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Talkback
What speaks for Linux
It's good to hear from the Linux Foundation, whatever your perspective on the merger, however your poll doesn't help clarify matters.
Who speaks with forked tongue?
Debian also proves MY point - that some Linux distros are so different, that they are essentially forks. The LSB was created BECAUSE of Debian - with its non-standard (different from standard UNIX) file names and non-standard directory structure. They had their own non-standard (not sysV or RPM) package system and install procedures (albeit "better" ...). Even in the bad old days of Solaris vs. HP-UX - I could still manage to tell which files to go modify, with Debian it's almost an exclusive club.
There are a million different ways to slice and dice Linux - and Debian is a shining example of that.
Hisss... Or Should I say Touche? (n/t)
IMHO
I ain't humble
I get sick of Debian. Often. I had another--mundane-- on the phone night before last in stitches as I described iceweasel (their foxfire fork) to him.
The above is why I find the idea of the Linux Foundation speaking for distros so laughable. Yes they are nice people. I have failed four times to install Mandriva so no I don't mean it when I say most distros are not well-behaved: if they were they wouldn't exist.
It's natural to get comfortable with what you have. I feel like Linux is too deep in some peoples' comfort zones and is tying up R&D resources better put to other purposes. And of course it is so much easier to try to denature Debian and call it Ubuntu than to do serious work and develop a consumer-friendly OS. Please give Mr. Shuttleworth a break, though. He lives in Cape Town, which my friends tell me is stressful in ways even Newark never was (in 1986 I used to ride the bus past the hospital with the largest group of AIDS patients in the country. While people were still talking about it as a disease passed through gay sex most of the cases I was aware of involved prostitution, sometimes forced, and IV drug use) and apparently never expected to get this far with it.
I don't know that the combined Linux Foundation is not a good thing, but I don't know that it is. My gut feeling is that too much support for Open Source is tied to support for Linux. This is a good article but in that context I feel it is hurt by the badly-phrased poll, which implies the Foundation is responsible for everything (OLPC anyone?).
What no HURD foundation?
NOTE: DEC did the "Curly" move - they stepped forward and developed OSF1 with the mach kernel - as a leader of the pack that was to follow. Everyone else took that step back, and mach turned to mush . . .
A New Foundation
I don't see that as so far-fetched. I believe in dragons too. Nicholas Negroponte called the Linux kernel bloated. He was talking in the context of OLPC. In that context he has a point.
It's becoming both more expensive and more complicated to do anything on a computer. Why? Because more and more people are asking "How can we do what you want with the tools at hand" before they ask "What do you want to do" instead of the other way around. The worst example of this is Microsoft, of course. Of course they feel they own or should own your files: they can't imagine you doing anything with them they didn't think up first (or buy the rights from whomever did). They come off as a bunch of rich geeks with no interest in anything anyone else has to say. Jobs is trying to sell luxury goods to affluent consumers, period. He's been open about that for years. It was kind of sad to watch so many small publishers and ad agencies go from Macintosh shops to total disillusionment with him. He helped kill SGI as a market force then threw the audience, both potential and actual, away because they weren't leisurely enough. And "mainstream" Linux distros can be this way too. You mentioned your distaste for how Ubuntu repackages Debian. I don't like Ubuntu, personally, but I've recommended it (within the past week). There isn't much out there.
There especially isn't much out there for the "budget-conscious" consumer. DRM and the efforts to enforce the "Millennium Copyright Act" have done more and more to disenfranchise kids who want to learn about these things. As someone who was nearly forty before he got his first personal computer I am well aware of how scarce these thing used to be, but that neither changes nor excuses such bizarre (but typical) comments as Bill Gates's that the OLPC was not powerful enough to do anything (This is after all the man who according to Dvorak on being told that Windoze was too slow on a 386 reportedly said "Wait till you see it on a 586"). We're told that M$ has gotten them to complicate the technology a bit so they can try to throw Windoze on it. It's hard not to take pot shots at their professionalism, since they are looking at how to use their tools to let people do what they need to rather than being willing to develop new ones based on the users requirements.
Not every grad student can afford a Vista upgrade. You and I might be comfortable with an OS where mkbootfloppy and make fdimage don't seem to work any more but why should we expect kids to have to?
No doubt Hurd has problems throwing new developers at may not solve, not least that Debian is distributing a version but it is still an alternative.
I respect Linus Torvalds and Alan Cox immensely. I don't want to suggest anything disrespectful of them, however this Linux Foundation as a replacement strikes me as one more example of the consolidation of the market towards the affluent end which disenfranchises the budget-conscious end so they can reserve economical strategies such as repackaging Debian rather than Fedora for non-technical users in Ubuntu (Wazobia Linux, which repackages Fedora for Nigerian users does seem technical. Wonderful but technical) for the high end users. Never mind that "discerning" is supposed to mean "able to see"
By consolidating in this way they are potentiallyeliminating both an economical path for develooping maintainers and a metric by which they can determine how best to serve high end users. Can they do it? Japan banned gunpowder for what -- three hundred years? We can do anything if we try hard enough.
At the same time the people who can't afford to upgrade are just going to keep being born, and they will have to do something. Miguel de Icaza was refused entry to the United States when Microsoft hired him. Some of course will turn to other fields, or they will turn to piracy, but to the extent Linux can no longer provide an economical set of tools for mastering development, it's more along the lines of someone will than that someone should.
This, of course, has not happened yet. It remains possible. Debian, as I said distributes Hurd and--hey--Mozilla was dead for how long before it came back and spawned Firefox and Seamonkey?
It doesn't have to be Hurd but it's not implausible.