Explore by tag: mcpherson

For those of you who haven’t heard, Barack Obama will be the first president to have a laptop on his desk at the oval office. (He does however have to give up his trusted Blackberry.)

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in a conversation with Arianna Huffington on MSNBC, today said that he hopes Obama uses a Mac and not a PC. Excuse me Eric (and Arianna) isn’t there another option you may be missing?

Regardless of your politics, it’s clear that Barack Obama’s campaign used the Internet to greater effect than any other campaign in history. Just check out his transition web site Change.gov to see this efficacy in action. He has stated he will create an office of the CTO for the United States. He has harnessed YouTube, text messaging, email fundraising and participatory campaigning to great success. So really, a Mac?

I think all ...

Read more »

In this month’s Linux Foundation newsletter:

* Linux Foundation publishes guide to participating in Linux community
* Linux valued at $10b by new Linux Foundation white paper
* Linux Foundation holds successful first End User Summit
* The flagship LSB portability tool Linux Application Checker is released
* The Linux Foundation launches Linux Developer Network beta
* CME Group, Nokia, and Canonical among many making membership moves
* Linux Fast Boot Developments

Popular Community Guide Gives Developers Roadmap to Kernel Development

In August, the Foundation released a new blueprint for developers who
wish to participate in the Linux kernel community written by Jonathan
Corbet. The publication, “How to Participate in the Linux Community,”
is available on the Linux Developer Network (LDN):
http://ldn.linuxfoundation.org/book/how-participate-linux-community.

Readers of the guide will learn why contributing code to the mainline
kernel is desirable, how the contribution process works, and how to
avoid common pitfalls along the way ...

Read more »

Next week, our Linux Foundation Japan office hosts the Linux Foundation Japan Symposium, an event that was started 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. The result of these events is the widening of a global Linux community, which benefits everyone.

In this Symposium, James Bottomley, Ric Wheeler, Ted Ts’o, Mr Kamezawa and Jon Corbet will be speaking and collaborating with local engineers from NEC, Fujitsu, Hitachi and other companies.

As preparation for these meetings we ask attendees to send questions ahead of time to help the speakers create appropriate presentations. One such question directed at Jon Corbet asked

You update LWN article so rapidly. Do you have a “kagemusha” (Shadow worrier, writer?) or are you a sextuplet?

An excellent question I have often wondered myself. For those of you ...

Read more »

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.)

Companies who attended included Credit Suisse, CME, AIG, Merrill Lynch, Dreamworks, NYSE, Fidelity, UBS, NYPD, US NAVY, Metlife, Morgon Stanley, JPMorgan Chase, Aetna, NAVTEQ, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFJ) and many more.  We were pleasantly surprised to have a full house.  Perhaps in these times companies are committed to making the most of their investments, especially open and lower cost investments.

Highlights of the Summit included:

A detailed unveiling of the next generation ...

Read more »

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?

Greg’s contention is that Canonical is a passive member of the Linux community since they do not contribute code upstream. The operative point, that Greg left out, is they do not contribute much to the projects that Greg defines as “Linux” (namely the kernel, GCC, binutils, etc.) I found his focus solely on this projects, at the exclusion of such key upstream projects as Gnome, mis-leading. The kernel is the core of ...

Read more »

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.

The reason this is important is clear to those familiar with the open source development process. Users need to connect with the community, especially those users who need cutting edge features and improvements in their software. But these users aren’t going to post questions to the Linux kernel mailing list: their companies will not allow them to publish this information so publicly. Unfortunately this means a lot of users aren’t getting the most out of Linux. Maybe even more ...

Read more »

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 is the free software community’s version of JFK’s Space Challenge that resulted in the Apollo program. In 1961, JFK issued a challenge to the United State’s Congress, our space program and our academic and scientific communities: put a man on the moon by the end of the decade. (It’s also a serendipitous comparison given Mark’s penchant for space travel.) Minus the cold war rhetoric, I was struck by similarities to the open source movement when I re-read JKF’s speech:

I believe we possess all the resources and talents necessary ...

Read more »

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. The article, “I’m so Totally, Digitally Close to You” discusses the state of our relationships in a wired world and raises the question of just how close we are to the circles of acquaintance that live within our online communities.

Thompson and others in his articles make the point that by scanning these feeds we can cultivate a type of ESP about those we follow: what they’re interested in, how they are feeling that day, what the weather is like where they live, their travel patterns. I have found Twitter to be effective in those areas, but even more so in tracking “community” reaction to news in technology. It’s an effective and ...

Read more »

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:

My working theory: The OS is being slowly downplayed as hardware vendors and Web developers grab more control over the user experience. The OS will never be totally irrelevant, but it will be increasingly less important. It’ll be plumbing. Simply put, the OS is being squeezed between hardware vendors that are cooking up their own applications to handle key tasks and the so-called Webtop, which will deliver programs through the browser.

I actually agree with much of what Larry says, even though ...

Read more »

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

The summit’s first panel yesterday, a State of Linux Roundtable, was made up entirely of Linux kernel hackers. During the Q&A session that followed, a gentleman from Nortel introduced himself and told the panel that Nortel was running Linux on one of its switches, and it worked just fine, but the company had to make a number of patches to the kernel to get it to work. He wondered how Nortel could get its patches into the mainstream kernel.

While I was pleased the kernel panel helped him with his request, I know that approach doesn’t scale. Not every developer can attend our Summits face-to-face after all. This wasn’t the first time I had heard this call for help: in Japan, in Korea, in Taiwan ...

Read more »

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?

Dechert and a couple of colleagues founded the Open Voting Consortium, a nonprofit group dedicated to delivering “trustable and open voting systems.” In addition to lobbying against proprietary voting machines, they have spent the last several years working with scientists and engineers around the world to design and build a voting machine of their own.

Probably many of you have heard of the Diebold voting machines that were designed for use in elections in this country. They are closed and proprietary systems ...

Read more »

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.

James Morris presented on the SE Linux project, Thomas Gleixner spoke about the advantages of the Completely Fair Scheduler and Paul Moore talked about labeled networking.  Toshiharu Harada,project manager of TOMOYO Linux, was  able to explain to the developers in attendance about how to participate in Linux development and provided words of encouragement to other young developers like ...

Read more »

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.

Just last year I would have leaped out of my chair (spilling my drink) and shouted to uninterested cafe neighbors, “Hey, look! The New York Times is writing about Linux on the desktop!” I’m used to reading about Linux in server applications. The New York Stock Exchange for instance. But until recently, Linux on the desktop was relegated to the technologist’s ghetto. If you didn’t love ...

Read more »

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.

As I watched and/or listened it struck me how many communities within communities were represented at the Summit. When we created the event our mission was to bring members of the Linux ecosystem together who normally don’t collaborate enough, but who should. Developers tend to talk to developers, industry talks to industry, end users yell at their vendors, but often don’t get to talk to the “community.” So far it seems to have been moderately successful. [Sometimes I struggle writing about community since it can mean ...

Read more »

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.

I was happy to talk about this with Dennis because I think it’s an under-the-radar topic. Just the week before I had a reporter ask me how Linux is going to deal with the threat of cloud computing. The threat? I told her that virtually all of the major cloud computing initiatives (except Microsoft’s) are built on Linux. (There is a potential displacement there for Linux distribution vendors but that’s another topic.) Linux as a platform is the enabling backbone of software as a service and cloud computing.

Recently, Bernard Golden at CIO Magazine wrote a very interesting article on the “migration of ...

Read more »

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?

Open source (especially platform software like Linux) is used in more and more companies, in more and more uses. Check out the Linux Kernel Development paper to see a long list. Because it’s open source you have a multitude of companies tied to the product and its success. In the Linux world, the platform is used by companies in the desktop, server and embedded markets. A member of the Linux community is not tied into one company since his or her skills or transferable to all of the ...

Read more »

“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. In this case, I can understand where Joe is coming from given the specific session he attended, but I would like to clarify a few points in his article about the general level of attention desktop Linux received at our Summit. I’m puzzled how our agenda, or Joe’s article for that matter, could be the source of this slashdot headline. Then ...

Read more »

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:

VIA Technologies, although very popular with Linux ultramobile PC vendors, has never been very open about its own hardware. Until April 8, when, at the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit at the University of Texas Super Computing Center here, the company announced that it will start opening up its chip sets to the open-source community.

The company also plans to adhere to a regular quarterly release schedule that is more aligned with Linux kernel changes and distribution releases. The announcement ...

Read more »

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. As I’ve said before, developers are the “indicator species” of a platform’s future. (There’s a joke in there about frogs and penguins but I digress . . .)

If you bring the developers, the end users will come. That is why everyone from Microsoft to Apple to Adobe and so on are fighting so hard for developer momentum. So this is why it’s not a coincidence that Adobe joins the LF now, with ...

Read more »

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.)

We regularly hold Linux Foundation Symposiums in Japan where key Linux developers meet with local developers to increase participation and encourage collaboration. These events have been very successful. Andrew Morton, for instance, has been quoted as saying he’s seen an increase in successful patches to the kernel from Japan by about 20% percent. While you can’t trace everything back to our regional outreach efforts, I do think it has a direct effect.

Building ...

Read more »