Linux Foundation is a corporate creation, not an advocacy group for individual community members
Posted by: Anonymous
[ip: 200.105.169.253]
on September 23, 2008 04:08 PM
This article doesn't lay the background for the reader. It is important to understand what the Linux Foundation is and what it isn't. It was created to be an advocacy group for the big corporate players. It is a merger of the Open Standards Group and the Open Source Development Lab. The OSG was an effort by the big corporations to standardize GNU/Linux so that it wouldn't fragment like UNIX did in the 80s and all the different distributions wouldn't become incompatible. The Linux corporations realized that fragmentation would kill the growth of Linux--the best strategy for growth was to unify the desktop and the system tools and grow the overall market rather than cannibalize from their competitors.
The OSDL was created so that Linus Torvalds wouldn't be hired up by a single Linux company and thus turn GNU/Linux into a vested interest for one company. Basically as I understand it, Linus was unemployed but he didn't want to go work for Red Hat, IBM, HP or any other big Linux company because it would undermine the independence of the Linux kernel. So the big players got together and created the OSDL to give Linus a job in a neutral place where he could continue working on Linux without any interruptions. In many ways it was a selfless act on the part of Linus because he would have earned a much bigger salary as an employee of one of the big companies, but he chose a much smaller salary at OSDL because it would help the kernel stay independent. Afterwards OSDL decided to hire a few of the other luminaries as well whose independence was also deemed critical.
Since the same corporations were participating in both the OSG and the OSDL, in the end it just made sense for them to merge to become the Linux Foundation. Despite the fact that Linus tried to stay independent, the Linux kernel has increasingly come to represent the interests of the large corporations who pay his salary and the salaries of most of the top kernel developers. Most of the current kernel development is in areas which are of little interest to the average desktop Linux user, but for specialized big-iron or real time embedded devices.
It is a good sign that the Linux Foundation is now looking for individual members, but don't delude yourself into thinking that it will represent your interests as an individual community member. If you want to have a voice over the direction of Linux and FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software), look to organizations which were set up to advocate for you, not for corporations. The groups which really advocate for individuals rather than corporate interests are the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Those are two groups which actively lead campaigns for user's rights. The FSF is not the most open group and certainly their selection of board members is not an open process, but they do try and involve the community as can be seen from the rewriting of the GPL3.
The Open Source Initiative does very little as far as I can tell, except for maintaining the Open Source definition and deciding with licenses comply. Bruce Perens tried to join its board and convert it into a more general advocacy group for users, but he was rebuffed. The only positive thing which I can say about the OSI is that it has always maintained that its board members should act as individuals and not as representatives of the Linux companies where they work.
If you want to be part of an advocacy group for community members join the FSF or EFF, you are likely wasting your time with the Linux Foundation. If you want to influence the development of GNU/Linux, I would advise participating in groups like GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, Apache, Debian o Fedora, where an individual voice is more likely to be heard. I think that the Linux Foundation realizes that it can't effectively represent the GNU/Linux community when it only allows corporate members, so we might be seeing a new focus, but I doubt it based upon the voting rights they are going to give individual community members.
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Linux Foundation is a corporate creation, not an advocacy group for individual community members
Posted by: Anonymous [ip: 200.105.169.253] on September 23, 2008 04:08 PMThe OSDL was created so that Linus Torvalds wouldn't be hired up by a single Linux company and thus turn GNU/Linux into a vested interest for one company. Basically as I understand it, Linus was unemployed but he didn't want to go work for Red Hat, IBM, HP or any other big Linux company because it would undermine the independence of the Linux kernel. So the big players got together and created the OSDL to give Linus a job in a neutral place where he could continue working on Linux without any interruptions. In many ways it was a selfless act on the part of Linus because he would have earned a much bigger salary as an employee of one of the big companies, but he chose a much smaller salary at OSDL because it would help the kernel stay independent. Afterwards OSDL decided to hire a few of the other luminaries as well whose independence was also deemed critical.
Since the same corporations were participating in both the OSG and the OSDL, in the end it just made sense for them to merge to become the Linux Foundation. Despite the fact that Linus tried to stay independent, the Linux kernel has increasingly come to represent the interests of the large corporations who pay his salary and the salaries of most of the top kernel developers. Most of the current kernel development is in areas which are of little interest to the average desktop Linux user, but for specialized big-iron or real time embedded devices.
It is a good sign that the Linux Foundation is now looking for individual members, but don't delude yourself into thinking that it will represent your interests as an individual community member. If you want to have a voice over the direction of Linux and FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software), look to organizations which were set up to advocate for you, not for corporations. The groups which really advocate for individuals rather than corporate interests are the Free Software Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Those are two groups which actively lead campaigns for user's rights. The FSF is not the most open group and certainly their selection of board members is not an open process, but they do try and involve the community as can be seen from the rewriting of the GPL3.
The Open Source Initiative does very little as far as I can tell, except for maintaining the Open Source definition and deciding with licenses comply. Bruce Perens tried to join its board and convert it into a more general advocacy group for users, but he was rebuffed. The only positive thing which I can say about the OSI is that it has always maintained that its board members should act as individuals and not as representatives of the Linux companies where they work.
If you want to be part of an advocacy group for community members join the FSF or EFF, you are likely wasting your time with the Linux Foundation. If you want to influence the development of GNU/Linux, I would advise participating in groups like GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, Apache, Debian o Fedora, where an individual voice is more likely to be heard. I think that the Linux Foundation realizes that it can't effectively represent the GNU/Linux community when it only allows corporate members, so we might be seeing a new focus, but I doubt it based upon the voting rights they are going to give individual community members.
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