Blogs

With apologies to my boss, a story in today's Wall Street Journal has me thinking that the future of Linux deployment might perhaps be even better than he predicted.

Given the recent brouhaha in Debian, and General Resolution regarding Lenny’s Release policy as it relates to Firmware and Debian’s Social Contract, which has led to the resignation of Manoj Srivastava from the position of Secretary for the Debian Project, I’m reminded of the following passage from Gordon Dickson’s Tactics of Mistakes (part of Dickson’s Childe Cycle, in which he tells the story of the rise of the Dorsai):

Yesterday I filed a pro bono amicus curiae (”friend of the court”) brief with the United States Supreme Court in support of the Federal Trade Commission’s petition for writ of certiorari in its suit against Rambus Technologies. I’m pleased to report that 19 standard setting organizations (SSOs) - including the Linux Foundation - representing over 13,300 members, joined as amici curiae supporting this brief; the list of participants appears later in this blog entry. As noted in the brief itself, these SSOs:

I am pleased to announce the availability of LSB 4.0 Release Candidate 1.

This version of LSB 4.0 has been put in the normal release directories, but IS ONLY A RELEASE CANDIDATE! In particular, certification is not yet open for LSB 4.0.

We are continuing to use the previously-announced beta page for accessing information on LSB 4.0 prereleases. That page can be found at:

https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/LSB_4.0_Beta

Last week, we launched the Linux Foundation video site. The site will of course house the growing collection of Linux Foundation original video from our events, but I hope it will also become a place for the Linux community to share their Linux video content. The intention is for it to become the central location for Linux videos, so Linux users and developers can easily find pertinent and educational Linux video information. If you have Linux video, we would appreciate your uploading it to this site.

The 2.6.28-rc8 kernel prepatch is out. That means that the final 2.6.28 release must be getting close. I once heard Linus say that he would never hold a kernel release past -rc9 regardless of the situation; there comes a point where you have to send it out into the world and get on with development. In this case, though, 2.6.28 appears to be stabilizing nicely. The list of regressions is getting fairly short. So this kernel will truly be ready to go soon.

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

It is hard for the executive director of the Linux Foundation to feel bad for Microsoft, but they are having a bad week while Linux continues to move forward in innovative ways into new markets for computing. Let’s take a look at the difference between Microsoft and Linux this week:

Novell is about to begin the Beta programs for SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 which is expected to be released early in 2009.  There will be a general Beta program for end customers, and there will be a separate Beta program for ISVs to help them get their applications ready for when SUSE Linux Enteprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 ships.  We are planning on following the Linux Standard Base Version 4.0 (which is in development now) with the release of SLE 11