Linux Foundation Announcements

Linux Foundation Workgroup Tackles Federal Mandate for Next-Generation Internet Protocol

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:22:44 +0000

Linux Foundation Workgroup Tackles Federal Mandate for Next-Generation Internet Protocol

Collaborative effort helps Linux “distros” obtain IPv6 certification

SAN FRANCISCO – November 24, 2008 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that its IPv6 (Internet Protocol Version 6) Workgroup has enabled the major Linux “distros” to meet the U.S. Federal Government’s Department of Defense (DOD) mandate and certification requirements for this next generation Internet protocol.

IPv6 is the next-generation Internet protocol designed to replace the current version, IPv4, which has been used for nearly 20 years. Due to the explosive growth of the Internet, it is expected that IPv4 addresses will be exhausted within just a few short years, resulting in an urgency for IPv6 compliance.

To accelerate IPv6 migration, the U.S. Federal Government put into place a mandate for all of its agencies to meet the next-generation Internet protocol requirements for any computing and networking equipment they acquire.

The Linux Foundation, with leadership from Venkata Jagana, Senior Technical Staff Member and Chief Architect of Networking within IBM’s Linux Technology Center, formed a Linux IPv6 Workgroup to collaboratively address this major undertaking and enable Linux-based machines to be next-generation Internet ready out of the box. Other active workgroup participants included HP, Nokia-Siemens, Novell and Red Hat.

“In early 2000, IBM recognized the need for Linux to be both IPv6 compliant and interoperable and started making development contributions by working with the Linux community and distros,” said Kathy Bennett of IBM’s Linux Technology Center. “Today, that effort, along with Linux Foundation’s IPv6 WG efforts, have benefited the Linux industry in achieving the Department of Defense IPv6 certification at a level which is leading in the industry.”

“The IPv6 mandate and ensuing requirements are such major undertakings that it makes it difficult for any one company to deal with it all on its own,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “This is exactly the kind of work and collaboration that the Linux Foundation can facilitate, and which results in real technology advancements for the Linux operating system.”

The Linux Foundation IPv6 Workgroup reviewed the mandate requirements and performed a detailed IPv6 gap analysis to identify where Linux needed to be adapted. As a result, existing Linux features, such as ICMPv6, DHCPv6, MIB support and IPSec for IPv6, are now updated to conform to the Department of Defense requirements.

For more information on the Linux Foundation’s IPv6 Workgroup and its analysis, please visit the IPv6 Workgroup website.

About the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the Linux Foundation sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and is supported by leading Linux and open source companies and developers from around the world. The Linux Foundation promotes, protects and standardizes Linux by providing unified resources and services needed for open source to successfully compete with closed platforms.

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Trademarks: The Linux Foundation and Linux Standard Base are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds. Third party marks and brands are the property of their respective holders.

Linux Foundation Publishes Study Estimating the Value of Linux

Wed, 22 Oct 2008 05:33:53 +0000

Linux Foundation Publishes Study Estimating the Value of Linux

New report finds the value of developing a Linux distribution to be worth $10.8 billion

SAN FRANCISCO – October 22, 2008 – The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced it is publishing a new report written by Amanda McPherson, Brian Proffitt and Ron Hale-Evans on the value of Linux development. The paper finds that it would take approximately $10.8 billion to build the Linux community distribution Fedora 9 in today’s dollars with today’s software development costs. It would take $1.4 billion to develop the Linux kernel alone.

The report, titled “Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution,” is available today.

This report is an update of a 2002 study done by David A. Wheeler that examined the Software Lines of Code (SLOC) present in a typical Linux distribution (Red Hat Linux 7.1). At that time, Wheeler found that it would cost over $1.2 billion to develop a Linux distribution by conventional proprietary means in the U.S.

The authors examined the Fedora 9 distribution using Wheeler’s tools and methods, specifically the SLOCCount tool that estimates value and effort of software development based on the COnstructive COst MOdel (COCOMO). The report goes into detail on the methods used, how they specifically apply to the Fedora distribution and the Linux kernel, and what an estimate of Linux’ value really means.

Highlights of the paper include:

– How Much Does a Full Distribution Cost?
Using 2008 salary figures, the tests published in the paper revealed that if developed today, the full set of Fedora 9 distribution packages would cost $10.8 billion. The Fedora 9 distribution contains 204.5 million lines of code in 5547 application packages. The development effort estimate comes close to 60,000 Person-Years.

– How Much Does the Linux Kernel Cost?
Applying this test to the Linux kernel included in Fedora 9 found the value to be 6.8 million lines of code worth $1.4 billion. The development effort estimate for the kernel alone exceeds 7500 Person-Years.

– How Does This Really Measure the Value of Linux?
This study reveals that collaborative development creates enormous economic value. In the past two years alone, over 3,200 developers from 200 companies have contributed to the kernel. An even larger number has contributed to full Linux distributions. Measuring the economic effort involved is imperfect, but this report clarifies why the methodology is the best approach and some of the limitations.

”This year has seen an incredible proliferation of Linux-powered devices outside of traditional Linux strongholds: devices powered by the Moblin platform, netbooks like the eeePC, mobile phones like the Gphone, and consumer devices like the Amazon Kindle. Would these products be possible without Linux?” said McPherson. “I think this points to the power of the collaborative development model. Monopolistic software companies used to be able to fund heavy R&D budgets, keeping out competition. Given the cost associated with building an OS like Linux, one wonders if proprietary companies will ever go it alone again.”

Amanda McPherson is vice president, marketing and developer programs, at the LF and leads its promotion, developer, and community-relations activities. Brian Proffitt is community manager with the LF, managing the Linux Developer Network. Ron Hale-Evans is senior specifications writer with the LF and works closely with the Linux Standard Base (LSB) developer team to create LSB specifications.

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The Linux Foundation’s FOSSBazaar Nearly Doubles its Membership

Tue, 14 Oct 2008 18:42:39 +0000

The Linux Foundation’s FOSSBazaar Nearly Doubles its Membership

Leading Linux consortia announces new members to participate in open source software governance initiative

SAN FRANCISCO, October 14, 2008 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux and open source software, today announced that its Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) governance workgroup, called FOSSBazaar, has nearly doubled its membership since launching in January.

The newest members include Ars Aperta, Black Duck, BT, Krugle, Palamida, and nexB, which contribute to 15 total members today.

Like proprietary software, FOSS requires due diligence to ensure legal, financial and security compliance. FOSSBazaar is the Linux and open source community’s approach to sustaining FOSS as a dependable choice for IT departments.

During its inaugural year, FOSSBazaar has both established an online destination where collaboration on these topics takes place (https://fossbazaar.org) and appointed full-time workgroup community leader Martin Michlmayr. Michlmayr is a well-known figure that currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Open Source Initiative (OSI). He has been involved in FOSS projects for more than 10 years, including having led the Debian project for two years. FOSSBazaar has also participated in collaborative forums this year such as the Annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit and OSCON.
“Software is increasingly comprised of components that are assembled from the open source community and other external sources,” said Bill McQuaide, Executive Vice President of Products and Services, Black Duck Software. “We are pleased to be joining the FOSSBazaar team who shares our commitment to evangelizing open source and educating software developers about how to use it safely and effectively.”
Jeremy Ruston, head of Open Source Innovation at BT Design said: “We believe that evolving good governance for FOSS is best done collaboratively, giving organizations the opportunity to share best practices and learn from one another. Through becoming a strategic partner in FOSSBazaar, we are pleased to have the opportunity to work alongside industry peers to make a valuable contribution to the FOSS community and play a key role in advancing the state of the art in FOSS governance.”

“nexB is very pleased to join FOSSBazaar because it fosters an open solution to leveraging and managing open source software in software products and enterprise IT,” said Philippe Ombredanne, CTO at nexB. “The best solutions for the open source software supply chain will come from applying open source methods and tools to the challenges at hand.”

“We are pleased to be joining FOSSBazaar,” said Mark Tolliver, CEO of Palamida. “It has rapidly become a highly valuable community site and we look forward to adding our expertise in open source management practices to make it even better and, as a result, to enable more organizations to realize the benefits of an open source strategy.”

FOSSBazaar was created as a Linux Foundation workgroup in order to share information and best practices for the adoption and management of open source software by enterprises, institutions and governments. The initiative was founded by Coverity, DLA Piper, Google, HP, the Linux Foundation, Novell, Olliance Group, OpenLogic and SourceForge.

About the Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is a non-profit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the Linux Foundation sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and is supported by leading Linux and open source companies and developers from around the world. The Linux Foundation promotes, protects and standardizes Linux by providing unified resources and services needed for open source to successfully compete with closed platforms. For more information on the Linux Foundation please visit www.linuxfoundation.org.

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Untangle Joins The Linux Foundation

Tue, 07 Oct 2008 16:16:10 +0000

Untangle Joins The Linux Foundation

Open source network gateway company Untangle increases community involvement with Foundation membership; academic affiliates also join the organization

SAN FRANCISCO – October 7, 2008 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Untangle is the newest member of the Foundation.

Untangle, developers of the Open Source Network Gateway, is joining the Linux Foundation as a way to further contribute to the open source community. It plans to take advantage of the exclusive Linux Foundation events and to collaborate with the Foundation on outreach to Linux User Groups (LUGs) throughout the globe.

“The increasing adoption of Linux and open source software depends on our collective efforts. We’re excited to join the growing community of Linux Foundation participants,” said Bob Walters, Untangle CEO. “Untangle has benefited greatly from the mass collaboration that the Linux Foundation facilitates and we’re proud to publicly support them and their mission.”

“Untangle has a long history of giving back to the community, and Its membership in the Linux Foundation is a natural extension of those actions,” said Amanda McPherson, vice president of marketing and developer programs at The Linux Foundation. “We’ve been very supportive of their impressive community and product efforts and are pleased to work more closely with them.”

Earlier this year, Untangle held its inaugural Installfest for Schools, which helped refurbish 350 computers with Ubuntu Linux for schools. In August, it held a second installfest at LinuxWorld in San Francisco where 750 additional computers were refurbished for schools. For more information on the Installfest for Schools please visit: http://www.untangle.com/installfest

Other recent additions to the Linux Foundation’s membership include the following universities at the academic affiliate level:

• Open Cyber University http://www.ocu.ac.kr/foreign/english/index.asp

• Oulu University of Applied Sciences, Raahe School of Engineering & Business
http://www.oamk.fi/raahe/english/

Linux Foundation Launches New Linux Event – LinuxCon – and Announces 2009 Event Lineup

Tue, 30 Sep 2008 18:14:43 +0000

Linux Foundation Launches New Linux Event – LinuxCon – and Announces 2009 Event Lineup

New annual technical conference will enable collaboration and education on Linux in North America

SAN FRANCISCO, September 30, 2008 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the creation of LinuxCon, a new annual technical conference that will be produced in the spirit of open source development – for the community, by the community. The Foundation today is also announcing the details for important Linux events including its annual Collaboration Summit and the Kernel Summit.

LinuxCon 2009 will take place September 2009 in Portland, Oregon, the open source “mecca” of North America. It will be co-located with the annual Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), which attracts a star-studded pool of technical talent. The first LPC, held this month, gathered together 300 leaders from the development community for face-to-face discussions and technical problem solving.

LinuxCon will include paper-based technical conference sessions, tutorials, keynotes, a technology showcase and targeted mini-summits on topics such as mobile, desktop and embedded, and much more. The Linux Foundation will work with community and industry groups to provide a place for mini-summits and other collaboration vehicles.

“LinuxCon will be where the best and the brightest from the Linux community share their knowledge with papers-based conference sessions, passionate discussions, and hands-on technical sessions,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director, The Linux Foundation. “This is not a top-down, for-profit conference controlled by a commercial entity. This is for the community, by the community.”

“LinuxCon will be a great opportunity for everyone who cares about the
success of Linux to learn, connect and collaborate,” said Kristen Accardi,
Kernel Developer and one of the founders of the Linux Plumbers Conference.

“LinuxCon will meet a crucial need for the community. We don’t have a single forum where Linux contributors and users can collaborate on real issues at every level,” said Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier, community manager, openSUSE. “The Linux Foundation is in a unique position to bring together the right people and ingredients for hands-on collaboration and productive networking. I won’t miss it.”

“As a worldwide Linux market leader and founding member of the Linux
Foundation, HP is committed to helping customers deploy Linux for
increased compute power, flexibility and IT efficiencies,” said Bdale
Garbee, Open Source & Linux Chief Technologist, HP. “We welcome a
comprehensive industry conference that takes us back to our roots and
offers developers, the user community and customers new research,
educational sessions and testimonials to speed market development of
open source alternatives.”

For LinuxCon, “community” is an inclusive concept, meaning that everyone with a stake in Linux is welcome. Linux developers will meet and learn from their peers and teach others, such as students and up-and-coming developers. Linux users can avoid the tradeshow environment while educating themselves on the latest technical advances of the Linux platform. And, whether vendors, users or developers are Linux veterans or new to the community, LinuxCon will connect them to the right people and the right information. Its co-location with the LPC and the support of the Linux Foundation will ensure that LinuxCon is attended by the most important leaders in Linux.

To support its growing events program, the Linux Foundation is also welcoming Craig Ross, co- founder of the Linux Symposium. Ross will join the Linux Foundation as Community Relations Manager.

Co-Locating with the Linux Foundation: Embedded Linux and Storage and File System Conferences

The Linux Foundation today is also announcing the dates and locations for its other popular annual events, including the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. Now in its third year, the Collaboration Summit will take place April 8 -10, 2009 in San Francisco, home to the Linux Foundation’s headquarters. It will be co-located with the CELF Embedded Linux Conference and the Linux Storage and Filesystem Workshop, which will enable the Linux community to save on travel and time while accelerating collaboration within its ranks.

Also announced today is next year’s Kernel Summit dates and location. The Kernel Summit will be held in Tokyo from October 18-20, 2009 and will be co-located with the new annual Linux Foundation Tokyo Symposium. This event will build on the Foundation’s existing Japan Symposium and will mature into a large-scale technical conference that brings together developers from throughout Japan and across Asia with the goal of increasing Linux education and development in these countries.

These events are in addition to previously announced events, including the End User Summit on Wall Street this October. The Linux Foundation also hosts a variety of regional and smaller-scale events to cater to an increasing need for forums that are focused on specific aspects of the Linux Platform that apply to large enterprise users, embedded systems makers, developers and vendors.

For more information about LinuxCon or the other 2009 Linux Foundation events, please write to events@linuxfoundation.org or check out www.linux-foundation.org/events.

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CME Group Joins The Linux Foundation

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:56:18 +0000

CME Group Joins The Linux Foundation

World’s largest derivatives exchange uses Linux to help manage trades in interest rates, equity indexes, currencies, and commodities

SAN FRANCISCO, September 23, 2008 – The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that CME Group, the world’s largest and most diverse derivatives exchange, has become a member of the Foundation.

CME Group has been recognized as one of the financial services industry’s biggest users of Linux. It first realized the benefits of Linux in 2003 when it reported that by using the operating system it would save significant costs, increase reliability, and dramatically reduce the round-trip time of a trade transaction. Since then, broader use and newer versions of Linux coupled with match engine and application improvements have helped continue that trend. In an industry where low latency is paramount, this reduction extended the fundamental savings of Linux by enabling more transactions to be made in a given day.

By joining the Linux Foundation, CME Group will be able to collaborate with key Linux developer and vendors. CME Group’s Vinod Kutty, associate director and head of distributed computing R&D, will become chair of the Linux Foundation’s End User Council. The Council is a group of the largest Linux end users who use the forum to collaborate and educate themselves on technical, legal and community efforts.

Kutty will also speak at the Linux Foundation’s End User Summit October 13 – 14, 2008, in New York where collaboration visionaries will share insights on the Linux development process. For more information on the Summit, please visit https://www.linuxfoundation.org/events/enduser.

“Our Linux Foundation membership allows us to move beyond just being users of Linux to being participants in the direction of this important technology,” said Kevin Kometer, Managing Director and Chief Information Officer of CME Group. “Joining the Linux Foundation and being deeply involved in Linux will also help the exchange determine the future use of our own technology. We’re looking forward to working closely with the Linux community to navigate this future.”

“The stability and flexibility of Linux fits so well in the financial world. It’s an extremely demanding environment,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. “We’re looking forward to CME Group’s contribution to Linux Foundation events and to vendor and developer understanding of what kinds of requirements large financial institutions have of Linux.”

In 2007, CME Group (www.cmegroup.com) traded a record 2.2 billion CME and CBOT contracts worth more than $1.2 quadrillion.

Building on the heritage of CME, CBOT and NYMEX, CME Group serves the risk management needs of customers around the globe. As an international marketplace, CME Group brings buyers and sellers together on the CME Globex® electronic trading platform and on trading floors in Chicago and New York. CME Group offers the widest range of benchmark products available across all major asset classes, including futures and options based on interest rates, equity indexes, foreign exchange, energy, agricultural commodities, metals, and alternative investment products such as weather and real estate.

About the Linux Foundation

The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the Linux Foundation sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and is supported by leading Linux and open source companies and developers from around the world. The Linux Foundation promotes, protects and standardizes Linux by providing unified resources and services needed for open source to successfully compete with closed platforms. For more information, please visit www.linux-foundation.org.

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Black Duck Joins The Linux Foundation

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 04:25:47 +0000

Black Duck Joins The Linux Foundation

BlackDuck joins Linux consortium to collaborate with industry’s leading open source legal experts

SAN FRANCISCO – September 10, 2008 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Black Duck Software has joined as a Foundation member. Black Duck provides solutions for software development teams and legal counsel to manage the hybrid software development process, which involves the assembly of internal software, open source software and other third-party code.

As more and more companies include open source in their applications, they are creating policies to manage the proper use of the code, taking into account legal obligations on copyrights. Black Duck will work with the Linux Foundation and its members to collaborate on legal programs that support software development including Linux and open source. The Linux Foundation is home to legal summits that provide an important vendor-neutral forum for leading in-house counsels from member companies HP, IBM, Intel, Novell, Oracle, Red Hat and now Black Duck, among others.

“Corporate counsels, outside law firms and internal software development teams have relied on Black Duck’s solutions for many years; indeed many very large enterprises have deployed Black Duck’s solutions to save developer time and reduce cost by providing a framework for hybrid development,” said Bill McQuaide, executive vice president of products and services at Black Duck Software. “For this reason, we look forward to lending our expertise to The Linux Foundation, which provides a forum for bringing users, vendors and developers together to discuss the evolving legal landscape in the open source software market.”

“Understanding the legal nuances of software has been an important topic for proprietary and open source software users and vendors for decades,” said Amanda McPherson, vice president, marketing and developer programs at The Linux Foundation. “But until now, companies didn’t have a neutral forum in which to discuss these seemingly sensitive matters. We’re happy to welcome Black Duck to participate in these valuable discussions.”

The next Linux Foundation Legal Summit will take place October 14 – 15, 2008 at IBM’s Hawthorne, New York facility. This event follows the Legal Summit in April of this year that took place at Motorola Customer Briefing Center in Schaumburg, Ill. The first LF Legal Summit was held October 25 - 26, 2007 in Boston and focused on effective ways to collaborate in the development of compliance, education programs, and evolving intellectual property rights policies optimized to support open development models.

For more details on this fall’s Legal Summit, please visit us here.

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The Linux Foundation Announces End User Collaboration Summit

Wed, 27 Aug 2008 15:13:32 +0000

The Linux Foundation Announces End User Collaboration Summit

New Event will drive collaboration between Linux developers
and end users

SAN FRANCISCO – August 27, 2008 — The Linux Foundation, the non-profit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the first Linux Foundation End User Collaboration Summit. The summit is a unique opportunity for end users to learn and interact with leaders from within the Linux community, including the highest level maintainers and developers.

The inaugural summit will take place October 13-14, 2008, at the Desmond Tutu Center in New York, New York and will provide end users a direct connection and voice to the kernel community. It will also give Linux community maintainers and developers direct access to knowledge sharing opportunities with the users of their software.

The event was created at the request of the Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board, which is comprised of key Linux community members. By bringing together sophisticated end users and senior Linux developers, the Linux Foundation hopes to accelerate innovation and adoption of Linux.

Highlights of the Linux Foundation End User Summit will include:

• An address from Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian, which will include a Q&A with the Linux Foundation’s executive director Jim Zemlin.

• A discussion with Paul Cormier, executive vice president and president, Products and Technologies, Red Hat.

• One-on-one discussions between end users and key Linux maintainers James Bottomley, Dave Jones, Christoph Lameter, Chris Mason, Andrew Morton, Arjan van de Ven, Chris Wright, and many more.

• A panel featuring notable Linux end users from the New York Stock Exchange, The Chicago Mercantile Exchange, AIG, Credit Suisse, Fidelity National Information Services, and more.

• A keynote address from Anthony Williams, co-author of the best-selling book Wikinomics, on how mass collaboration is changing the economics of the software industry, with far reaching implications for end users.

• Jon Corbet from LWN.net will present the Linux Weather Forecast, with a spotlight on where the Linux kernel is headed in the next 12 to 24 months.

• A candid discussion about end user participation in Linux with Rishab Ghosh and Red Monk’s Stephen O’Grady.

“The open source development model is unique. End users not only give feedback on the software; they’re a fundamental and critical part of the community, submitting patches and developing new features themselves,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “Before this event, however, there was no neutral forum that would advance and optimize this collaboration. The End User Summit will fill this gap and accelerate problem solving for Linux.”

The Linux Foundation fosters innovation by hosting events for the Linux technical community, application developers, industry and end users. These events help to solve pressing issues facing Linux and fuel collaboration and communication between all members of the Linux ecosystem: developers, users, industry, ISVs and distribution vendors. Other Linux Foundation events include a mix of industry and community conferences such as its annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summits, Kernel Summit, the Linux Plumbers Conference and the Linux Foundation Legal Summits.

More information on this and other events can be found at here.

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Mozilla’s Mitchell Baker Featured in Open Voices Podcast Series

Wed, 20 Aug 2008 14:59:41 +0000

Baker shares her views on mass collaboration, navigating the open source community and AOL, Google and Microsoft

Core News Facts

• The fifth Open Voices podcast installation features a conversation with Mozilla Chairman, Mitchell Baker, and the Linux Foundation Executive Director, Jim Zemlin.
• Baker admits that Mozilla’s open source strategy was in direct reaction to market and competitive pressures and calls out Microsoft for illegal activities.
• As one of the first software projects to “open source” its technology, she explains how the Mozilla Foundation navigated community, licensing and growth issues.
• Baker also shares her opinions on the motivations and ingredients involved in mass collaboration, specifically around the Mozilla and other open source projects.
• Previous podcasts have featured conversations with Linus Torvalds, Mark Shuttleworth of Ubuntu, Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian and Oracle’s Edward Screven.
• The podcast series is one of many information sources the LF hosts or facilitates. Other activities include the recently released Guide to Participating in the Linux Kernel Community by Jonathan Corbet and the Linux Foundation study on Who Writes Linux and Who Supports It.

Podcast Excerpts

Baker on competition:
“We have always lived in a brutally difficult product landscape…In the late 1990’s, Netscape had gone from a position of having enormous market share for the browsers, probably as high as in the 90’s, I think, before Microsoft got involved, to a steadily declining market share. Partly because Microsoft is a great competitor and they’ve built some good products, and partly because they engaged in a campaign of illegal activities. And then you combine those and the Netscape market share had been dropping steadily for quite some time. So it’s clear that the way of producing a browser and how we were trying to keep choice and alternatives alive had to be done differently. Thus open source.”

Baker on mass collaboration:
“There is a sense, I would say, of community and bonding that is an extreme motivator. Sometimes people ask me why anyone would work on a software project if they weren’t getting paid for it. Well, think about how many people don’t like their job. Or, feel like they’ve got expertise that doesn’t get used. Or, their colleague or the management or the people they’re responsible for get in the way. Or, a company is going in a direction that doesn’t make sense and cuts off all the interesting projects and your advancement isn’t based on reputation or skill, it’s based on, you know who happens to like you. Well, we can mitigate or eliminate almost all of those things in an open source project. And so it turns out a lot people don’t want to be couch potatoes, right. And if you provide a setting in which something really interesting is happening and it matters; you can see that other people use it and it’s got really smart people working on it, and they will accept you if you find interesting things to do, and some of them will even help you. And you can see the results of that, you now, you can generate a reputation and have people interested in you and have your work used by millions of people. That rolls up into a pretty motivating package.”

Open Voices Podcast Series

Listen to the Open Voices Podcast with Mitchell Baker

Open Voices with Edward Screven of Oracle

Open Voices with Ron Hovsepian of Novell

Open Voices Podcast with Mark Shuttleworth

Open Voices with Linus Torvalds, Part II

Open Voices with Linus Torvalds, Part I

Multimedia Elements

Follow the Linux Foundation on Twitter

Check out the Linux Foundation’s photos on Flickr

Or Join the Linux Foundation Group of Facebook

Subscribe to Open Voices

Canonical Joins The Linux Foundation

Mon, 18 Aug 2008 03:09:09 +0000

Commercial sponsor of Ubuntu ® looks to support cross-industry collaboration and promotion to fuel Linux growth

SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. – August 18, 2008 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Canonical has become a member of the Foundation.

Canonical is the commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, a popular version of the Linux operating system, and supports a wide range of other open source projects including Bazaar, Storm and Upstart. Ubuntu has become a popular choice for the server and desktop as well as for the rapidly emerging areas of netbooks and mobile Internet devices.
Matt Zimmerman is the CTO of the Ubuntu project in Canonical, chairs the Ubuntu Technical Board and leads all engineering efforts for the distribution.

“The Linux Foundation occupies a critical, non-commercial function in the use and popularization of Linux around the world. We’ve always seen the Linux Foundation’s value and are pleased to now become an official member and support its activities. We look forward to working with them to continue the march of Linux in all areas of computing,” said Matt Zimmerman, Ubuntu program manager and CTO, Canonical.

Ubuntu community members have been active participants in a variety of workgroups at the Foundation, including the Linux Standard Base, Desktop Architects and Driver Backporting groups. With Canonical’s support, user interests for both commercial and community versions of Ubuntu will be represented.

“Canonical is an important new member for the Linux Foundation,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation. “Matt and his team have created an exciting distribution that has taken the world by storm. They have rallied the cause of cross-industry, cross-community collaboration for years. We are extremely pleased to work even more closely with Canonical as we push Linux to the next stage of growth.”

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