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Whither the Linux Foundation? PDF E-mail
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by Sam Varghese   
Tuesday, 22 April 2008
We live in the age of the spinmeister, the age when language is used more as a means to confuse than to educate, an age when obfuscation is preferred to clarification.

Hence, one should not be surprised to find Jim Zemlin, the head of the Linux Foundation, referring to a face-to-face meeting of kernel developers and industry people as a "high bandwidth set of interactions."

The Foundation, one must bear in mind, was formed at the beginning of 2007 by a merger between the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group.

This is the same group that, last year, asked people to respect Microsoft .

The Foundation held its second annual collaboration summit with industry in the first week of April - and one must be grateful that it has finally clarified what exactly it is all about.

For some time now, I've been wondering what is important - the Foundation itself or the kernel which it claims to support.

Now I have no doubt - the Linux Foundation is dedicated to ensuring that kernel developers get to understand the needs of industry. Whether they then work towards fulfilling those needs remains to be seen.

But given that the Foundation pays Linus Torvalds and a couple of other key developers, one can't help but feel that there would just be that little bit of pressure on these kernel folk to satisfy their benefactor.

I mean, when you get paid by someone you do tend to feel just that bit obligated to your paymaster - that's only human.


 
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