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Hi all, and thanks for reading about OpenRelief. We are now in a six-month cycle of testing and improving the robot plane and related sensors, and aim to have a durable set of solutions published as schematics and code by December. The idea is to allow anyone, anywhere to make OpenRelief solutions using readily available technology.

I thought it might be useful to share a little more information with you via this page. With that in mind please find some overview information below.

A video overview of OpenRelief and the robot plane:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZROTYm17_Uc

An interview with a deep-dive into why OpenRelief was established and where it is going:
http://www.designspark.com/content/openrelief-clearing-fog-disaster

A copy of the slides we just presented at LinuxCon Japan to launch the project (warning: PDF):
https://events.linuxfoundation.org/images/stories/pdf/lcjp2012_coughlan.pdf

Regards

Shane
Co-Founder, OpenRelief

Not in Europe, but The Worlds Largest Linux Desktop Deployment: 500,000 Seats and Counting in Brazil should count for something.

My experience with a cheap 64GB SSD (Kingspec) is completely different. I replaced my laptop's original 5400rpm Hitachi HDD with it. The boot time was reduced from circa 25s to 6s and most programs start without noticeable delay. And this is with low end SSD that connects to PATA interface. Boot performance seems to be mostly about low times for seeks and small reads in which pretty much any SSD runs circles around mechanical drives (seek times are generally 100-200x lower on SSDs). Low total bandwidth of the interface is really non-issue for most of my use. (no large copy operations between drives)

Did you align your partitions to the erase block boundary? Otherwise your SDD performance could be severely degraded as the drive has to do two read/modify/write cycles when one would suffice. These things (or the partitioning tools) are not yet plug and play.

Ted Tso has written informative article about aligning FS to erase block size, which can be found here.

Calling people idiots. He's young looking, maybe not so mature? Let's see, what has Jim Zemlin done... The about him from his blog. His staff page at the Linux foundation. Seems like... a manager in marketing? Aside from blabbing off, what are his contributions?

A relatively badly designed website. It was not obvious (at least to me) but here is the link, and you have to give them your email address: Live Video Streaming link

.

Yet another DVCS article that doesn't mention Bazaar at all.

Well, in all fairness, the article is entitled "The Rise of Git".

And I know that performance isn't everything, but for some of us who run git everywhere to track our home dir (see the end of that article) kind of find the performance of git to be pretty nice. Other people have come to similar conclusions.

Google's vast infrastructure runs on GNU/Linux, and they sponsor the yearly Summer of Code that creates a lot of new FOSS code. They are an open source company, even if they keep their main revenue-producing technology closed.

So what exactly is an open source company then? You know Microsoft runs the CodePlex open source project hosting and hosts quite a lot of open source projects that they have done and use there, but i wouldn't call them and 'open source company' and they - like google - keep their main revenue-producing technology closed.

Google's vast infrastructure runs on GNU/Linux, and they sponsor the yearly Summer of Code that creates a lot of new FOSS code. They are an open source company, even if they keep their main revenue-producing technology closed.

Yeah, I know right? Except, it's not. According to that credible report, 80 percent of the kernel comes to us via paid development.

So there's 20% of unemployed amateurs...better abandon the platform.

The development environment for your precious monodroid doesn't run on Linux anyway.

my precious monodroid? I have no involvement in the project and i don't even own an android device.

I'll come out and say it. I cannot write apps in monodroid that are as good as apps that can be written in the real development kit nor can I write them as quickly.

FTFY, don't project your inadequacies onto everyone else.

First of all, all of the developer documentation is written assuming java and Eclipse so you are hamstrung out of the gate using anything else.

So if you know C# and have developed functionality already you don't need to learn those java/eclipse aspects, you can leverage existing knowledge.

There are no tablet specific api's on monodroid so you are always going to be a step behind other developers.

Tablet-specific APIs? What is it you need that you seem incapable of doing with scalable code? or is it that you aren't/can't do scalable code?

Worst of all, there is a performance penalty so by definition, there are some applications that can be written using java that will be too slow to deploy to users on monodroid.

It's not the be-all and end-all of frameworks, you don't have to choose between mono or native. It's the same thing we have been doing in software development for ever, you choose the best tool for the specific job.

It's bad enough developing within the constraints of a mobile device in the first place

Welcome to software development, since you're new here you should learn to appreciate that the constraints of modern mobile development are actually quite relaxed and that those of us who have been in the field for a while find this to be extremely easy.

At this point, I have to assume you monodroid people are all trolls out to confuse the development situation on Android to the benefit of competing platforms.

And of course you assume wrong. I'm not a monodroid developer, but i have tried and can see the benefit in it if i were to develop and application that leverages that advantage.

Linux was initially developed - and continues to be developed - by unemployed amateurs too

Yeah, I know right? Except, it's not. According to that credible report, 80 percent of the kernel comes to us via paid development. And why do you care anyway? The development environment for your precious monodroid doesn't run on Linux anyway.

clearly that's what you are implying given you seem to think that the 'big money', which comes from the end users (and advertisers), depends on the framework, which they know nothing about and has absolutely no impact on it whatsoever.

I'm not implying anything. I'll come out and say it. You cannot write apps in monodroid that are as good as apps that can be written in the real development kit nor can you write them as quickly. First of all, all of the developer documentation is written assuming java and Eclipse so you are hamstrung out of the gate using anything else. Secondly, for RAD, there is no drag and drop gui designer for monodroid, There are no tablet specific api's on monodroid so you are always going to be a step behind other developers. Worst of all, there is a performance penalty so by definition, there are some applications that can be written using java that will be too slow to deploy to users on monodroid. It's bad enough developing within the constraints of a mobile device in the first place, do you actually think I'm going to gimp it even more? Get real. At this point, I have to assume you monodroid people are all trolls out to confuse the development situation on Android to the benefit of competing platforms.

I don't really see how they can use patents against "Linux" -- you can't sue "Linux" as an organization.

They can't sue the Linux Foundation? Why?

Oh, and in case you missed why I'm mentioning them, they are Linus Torvalds employer.

I have a Samsung ML-1740 laser printer. It's cheap, is no longer sold, but it works fine as long as you can print to it. My niece's linux laptop was able to print to it immediately, but Snow Leopard balked at it and I can't actually print to it anymore from my machine. Perhaps if I knew more about printing it would be trivial to write my own driver or install a third party driver that actually works with that model of printer.

Try the driver for the Samsung ML-1710 printer. I hear that it mostly works for the Samsung ML-1740 with only a few minor glitches. You can also give this driver package a try.

I have never gotten my Airport Extreme to share printers via its USB port properly. They'll print once or twice and then crap out and need to be restarted. I haven't determined if this is a property of the HP printers that are causing this issue or if it's something related to the Airport.

I've seen this problem with a couple of HP printers in various situations. I think it has something to do with their USB ports. Occasionally I have to disconnect them and reconnect them and then they work. It's an odd bug for sure.

IAccessible2 is a new accessibility API which complements Microsoft's earlier work on MSAA. This API fills critical accessibility API gaps in the MSAA offering. IAccessible2 was created out of necessity to produce a usable and accessible OpenDocument Format (ODF) based office suite for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. IAccessible2 is an engineered accessibility interface allowing application developers to leverage their investment in MSAA while also providing an Assistive Technology (AT) access to rich document applications such as the IBM Workplace productivity editors and web browsers such as Firefox. The additional functionality includes support for rich text, tables, spreadsheets, Web 2.0 applications, and other large mainstream applications.

Are you telling me that this will magically get Windows Phone 7 phones to have accessibility support? Because I'm not reading that.

Additionally, Microsoft seems pretty conciliatory on this. From the AFB link:

Andy Lees, president of Microsoft's Mobile Communications Business, accepted responsibility, saying, "We were incompetent on this."

If only there was some way to tunnel IPv4 and/or IPv6 through an IPv4 connection!

"That's the word from the Linux Foundation's report on adoption trends. The report was conducted by the Yeoman Technology Group, and surveyed nearly 2,000 users picked by the Linux Foundation End User Council. The results released yesterday were culled from 387 respondents that are from the largest organizations -- companies with more than 500 employees and/or more than $500 million a year in revenue" link

"The Linux Foundation, in partnership with Yeoman Technology Group, recently conducted a survey of 1,948 Linux users. This invitation-only survey pool was comprised of the Linux Foundation End User Council as well as other companies, organizations and government agencies selected by The Linux Foundation and Yeoman" link

I guess they are just going to have a contract with Microsoft. It will deliver them Windows CE in a new India look.

Seriously, how long it will take and how much do they think in will cost to create not only a full operation system from scratch but add the whole Windows API to it? If they are going do proprietary they can't re-use any code from Linux, Wine or GNU. The Linux kernel (Fedora 9, linux-2.6.25.i686) costs about $1,372,340,206 to develop. Now if you only going to develop 10% of it, it will still cost you 137 million dollars. Add to it the costs for proprietary code (bought code or self developed code, like the compilers, development tools, a window manager) and the Windows API layer.

Maybe the developers are way cheaper than in the USA/Europe but with the costs are going to be at least 200 million dollars. For another invented wheel with the same bugs and security holes like linux 1.0.

No platform? What about the Linux Standard Base?

The Open Source community is about shared effort for shared gain, not personal recognition.

Have you spent a moment in the "Open Source community"? The majority of contributions to Linux are from profit-making corporations.

Not true for the Linux Kernel. Most of the contributions to Linux come from individuals without a company. After that are unknown contributers. Then companies.
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/sites/main/files/publications/linuxkerneldevelopment.pdf

That's not what GP is suggesting (not a machine nor a distro): he's talking about a standard like the LSB, but for games.

It's on the TODO list apparently:
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/blogs/browse/2009/06/conversation-chris-mason-btrfs-next-generation-file-system-linux

what is today doesn't warrant the tomorrow

Yes, yes it does. The way the world is today does determine what happens tomorrow. Burden is on you to show why the future looks different.

there is no tux without young, fresh blood

You again assert things without evidence. The reality is that, first, Tux is a mascot, and it's really grating when you use it as a synonym for Linux -- Tux the mascot will exist as long as Linus wants him to exist, as Linus holds that trademark. Second, Linux the kernel will exist as long as people have a use for it, because as long as people have a use for it, it will financially make sense to contribute to it.

i don't know on which planet u live

This one.

m$ moved strong on the enterprise development domain not only on the desktop

On the desktop, they have a near-monopoly. On the server, not even close -- not even half.

on the desktop tuxi is and will be a no-no.

Tuxi is a word you just made up. Please stop.

And I run Linux on the desktop. Linux desktop marketshare is growing. Slowly, but it's growing.

there is no market dominance without the desktop

Bullshit. IBM dominates the mainframe market. When was the last time they dominated the desktop?

in the last 7 years i haven't seen even one enterprise deployment on linux

You clearly haven't been looking very hard.

on tux i seen only couple of crappy php sites, basta

Johny the user-looser gives no crap on couple of supercomputers or what is running his 4x4 automatic guzzler

And why is Johnny relevant to this discussion? I thought we were talking about whether Linux is dead or dying, and it obviously doesn't need this one particular user, nor the unwashed masses. Never has.

what he cares is seeing his porn nice and smooth

Nope, clearly he cares about more than that. If that's all he cared about, Linux will do it smoother and without the spyware.

I don't often see someone be wrong more than once per sentence...

The reality is (as usual) quite different, and the old arguments have nothing to do with the kernel anyway. Look at the latest statistics of who actually writes the kernel: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/whowriteslinux.pdf. From this paper it is clear that the rate of changes has increased quite a bit, and that the latest Linux release probably had something like 1800 different contributors. If you go back 5 years that number is just 400, so the assumption that there are "no new developers" is clearly false. What the first article is really about is that there are "no new subtree maintainers", but that should hardly surprise anyone. The Linux kernel is a huge pyramid (similar to a big corporation in a way), the people on the bottom of the pyramid are not the ones who get sent to the kernel summit, and the people on the top tend to like it there. I doubt that the _average_ age of all the Linux kernel developers have changed all that much in the last 5 years, it might even have gone down a bit, as more of the development is done in China, Japan and India these days.

Linux on the desktop might not be growing as quickly as some might hope, but it keeps growing faster and faster in almost every other market segment. When was the last time you heard about a new mobile phone, set-up box, web-service or computer science project which was not based on Linux? Sure, Microsoft and Apple might launch their new products now and then, but they are tiny compared to the rest of the market.

87% of all statistics are made up on the spot 95% of the time. Your "95%" was pulled from a dark, smelly place.

The facts are here, for the Linux kernel as an example, and they show that almost 19% of the Linux kernel is supported by individuals and about 7% have unknown affiliations, leaving only 75% that are known to be employed by corporations. Most other FOSS project have less corporate support than does the Kernel, so the individual support is well above 25%. On many FOSS projects there is NO corporate support.

You also fail to appreciate that corporations get back in return MORE than what they've invested, or they wouldn't assign company programmers to contribute code to the Kernel under the GPL. Using the kernel again, a single corporation may assign 9 coders to work on the Linux kernel, but the kernel they use was developed with the aid of 4901 corporate employees working for 531 OTHER corporations, so that corporation has received the value of 4901 coders that they didn't pay for. Does Ellison think that paying for 9 but getting the work of 4,901 is a good return on an investment?

Personally, from what I've read of Ellison, I believe that simple minded greed will rule his actions and I'll predict that he will eventually see Linux as competition to his new proprietary Solaris+Hardware business and began fighting Linux or even try to hijack it the way SCO's McBride tried to do.

According to my son, the Oracle administrator, Oracle's paid support stinks. While his employer pays thousands for support he gets better help from the free, independent public forums attended by other Oracle users. But, pointy haired CEOs seem to think that they MUST buy commercial support from the vendor, regardless of its value.

Oracle's claims support for the following Open Source Software, but at least one is under a CDDL license, which is not like the GPL.

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/news-media/blogs/browse/2010/02/microsoftamazon-deal-nothing-see-here

Imagine that what is being discussed was a sorce of energy and not software and that spokeperson Graham Dry said:.

"The Australian Government Energy Management Office says that the cost of a platform change could cost more than it saves. It was pushed to investigate alternative energy source to reduce its AUD$500m budget at a Senate meeting yesterday. From the article: 'Agencies are obliged to consider value for money on each occasion they choose an energy source,' spokesperson Graham Dry said. 'If the cost of assessing it [alternative energy] was greater than the cost of the energy, you would have to think twice.'"

First, if the cost of assessment is so high then you are more locked in than you realize and than you should have been at the first place. (And on the other hand, if by some stroke of luck, we would really-really-for-real find energy which costs less then current cheapeast sources, I doubt that maintenance and support costs would make us drop that particular path without even properly assessing it.)

Secondly, lets assume you have thought twice and decided to drop the idea of open source. That will definitively be the right strategy. For sure. Better yet - forbid that open source should be used by any government agency (due to possibly 'higher costs of switching to it', which means government's inability=incompetence and/or unwillingness=lobbied to even assess it!), and then just wait for proprietary vendors to lower their prices. That sounds like a great plan. Sure to attract many anarchist votes.

Secondly, these kind of things should not be examined at each ocasion - they require strategy. Like, for example, deciding what sort of energy should be used in public transport. Anything short of 15 year plan should not even be considered.

Here's a short calculation - 15 years of 500M budgets with growth of 8% yearly amounts to 13.58B in 15 years. Let's say that half of the software costs could be open sourced - this gives you 6.79B over 15 years to ensure support and maintenance, on top of community support and maintenance.

I quicky googled out that for 10B you could write Fedora 9 from scratch. That's all of the software in Fedora 9 repos, including openoffice and linux kernel (ref from linuxfoundation.org, based on line numbers with overhead factors). It is a lot, but it does not sound out of scope for some governments' budgets.

The main problem here is that countries do not realize what is their position in terms of software systems. They fail to see them as strategic resource. Like energy. Which they are. And that's why it is important. And proprietary vendors know this and do their homework by lobbying government bodies and international organizations (standards).

Actually one of the differences between the software systems and energy, from the government perspective, is that energy sources are mostly defined (research output has results which are simple - in essence this much of energy for that much $), where the software systems can be built according to requirements. At least in theory. In practice you have open software where this is the driving factor and proprietary software where this comes way after maximizing profits.

I have sent them an e-mail requesting that they use an open, patent-free and royalty free format such as Ogg Theora or Dirac. If you care about the same then please let them know:

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/contact

I'm using Linux. And I'm boycotting flash. So I'm here on an Ubuntu Linux (my home computer) and can't watch the videos on http://video.linuxfoundation.org/category/we-are-linux-foundation-video-contest the linuxfoundation is talking about. WTF? You people should try to make some accessibility example for OSS folks if you want to be taken seriously. What is this carp??

On the other hand, reading about the content of the videos, maybe it's better this way..

The Linux Foundation also did this in 2009. Here are last year's winners.

Also, I'm pretty sure that good results come from people who know their tools, and not from the tools themselves. A large amount of the video-editing tools on Linux leave a lot to be desired, but they're still light-years ahead of what was available, say, 20 years back. People made (and still make) good videos/movies without any kind of digital intervention, so that snide remark is probably debatable.

Red Hat 11.2%
Novell 8.9%
Linux Foundation 2.6%
Oracle 1.3%

(among others)

Source: https://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/linuxkerneldevelopment.php

Considering most of them(Linus included) used to do it for free in their after work times? I'd say pretty good.

Dominated is the wrong word.. Linus for instance refused to have a "Linux job" for years because he was afraid it would taint his decision making. Now he works for the Linux Foundation so hes guaranteed neutrality. A lot of other developers got hired because some corporation liked what they were doing but wanted it done faster so it's more a matter of Linux developers getting payed to do what they were doing anyways.

If your worried that corporations are taking over you can always get yourself an Individual Linux Foundation Membership and offset the corporate influence that way.

As someone who doesn't like RPM based distros and as someone who makes a very good living on Linux, I've gone the Linux Foundation membership route $100 a year is nothing compared to the money Linux makes me each year.

I bought: Crossover Linux. And you know what? It does make closed-source Windows applications pretty darn easy. Everything is kept firmly in your ~ as it should be stability wise. There are many awesome package managers out there and with Ubuntu as an example because that is what I'm familiar with: any commercial developer could create their own PPA for end-users to add as a repository themselves. The issue is making the format for repositories a standard and adopting it across distributions. Perhaps, the package manager should be part of: Linux Standards Base if it already is not?

This is an important question.

Microsoft has already tried selling patents that could undermine Linux to patent trolls. If they have embeded patented methods in Mono/Moonlight, they could spring the trap at any time by selling the patent or transferring it to a proxy (like SCO).

Interestingly too, the promise very specifically only covers Moonlight.

"This patent covenant only applies to Moonlight and the version of Mono that ships with Moonlight," Goldfarb said.

The failure to extend the promise to Mono would suggest Microsoft would still like to retain the option of preventing any non-Novell Linux distro from including the full Mono at some point in the future.

Bad 3rd party hardware drivers are the cause of 99% of Windows Bluescreens.

And...

I don't understand your statement that the kernel should not contain drivers.

How do you consolidate these two thoughts in your brain?

As: Drivers should be managed by kernel people (which they do). If you wanted to move all drivers outside the (now micro-)kernel, you should have made that point clear.

The grandparent is right: Linux needs a standard and solid driver interface. Not only do hardware makers have to jump the hurdle of "Linux has very few users", the kernel developers have decided to throw in a whole mess of new hurdles which make Linux driver development *harder* than for commercial OSes.

That's just BS. It is answered by kernel developers several times: http://www.mjmwired.net/kernel/Documentation/stable_api_nonsense.txt

They also say:
"We have repeatedly found [Binary modules] to be detrimental to Linux users, businesses, and the greater Linux ecosystem. Such modules negate the openness, stability, flexibility, and maintainability of the Linux development model."
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/publications/kernel-driver-statement

For getting a Linux driver, you do not have to spend money/time at all. http://lwn.net/Articles/219791/

So, you start out behind because you don't have a huge user base, and you set yourself further behind because it's harder to write the driver.

Additionally, if you put the necessary scaffolding in place, you could create a system where no drivers run in the kernel, and thus no drivers are able to blue-screen the computer. BeOS did this in, what, 1994? Surely Linux can do it in 2009. Heck, Windows 7 is almost at that goal.

There are a lot of markets Linux can succeed in without addressing this-- ereaders, cellphones, etc-- but on the desktop? This should be priority one.

You can come up with proofs of concept for a lot of things, but the value of Linux lies in its code maintainance. Citing dead operating systems isn't helping. I'd say kernel panics are extremely rare.

Not defending MS in the slightest, but it's extremely naive to think Open Source, and especially Linux is not recieving heavy funding and help fom the biggest players in the market. http://www.linuxfoundation.org/about/members

DISCLAIMER: I sometimes use ubuntu server so I can't really point any fingers re: CGL

Be careful, "ok for carrier-grade" isn't the same as being CGL 4.0 compliant. There are only a handful of certified CGL's.

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/cgl

I've personally had great experiences with Asterisk but we're using it in a completely nonstandard (if there is such a thing) way.

We do a lot of code hacking to emulate customer troubles with presentation, etc.

For us, it's great and filled our needs way better than a commercial offering that would have done the same but with a boatload of cash.

We don't deploy Asterisk as a vendor to clients so I can't comment on production viability.

(Ironically, I just got pinged by some of our security people regarding the latest exploit and now have some code to update.)

Oh yeah: The views expressed in this post (and any other post I've made in this thread) are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.

See the following sites:
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Net:Bonding
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1238308


That should give you a good start.

For most developers, open source software is a hobby. A valuable one, yes, but I would suspect that "fewer than 1.5%" of open source developers actually have that in their primary job description.

Well, speaking for Linux, at least, Baloney. Not just a lot, but a majority of the Linux kernel development is done as someone's paid job. I'd be surprised if something similar isn't true of other significant open source projects, such as Firefox, GNOME, KDE, Moblin, OpenOffice.org, MySQL, etc.

I'm surprised no one has given this link:
http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/openprinting

Real men do that with their entire GUI on the trip...

http://ldn.linuxfoundation.org/article/gtk2-let-application-follow-you

(NO, I haven't been using that, but it's damn tempting)

Conficker racked up $9 billion in damages during its first quarter. That's far from the only worm out there. Old windows malware doesn't go away it's just added to the zoo.

Compare that to the estimated development costs for your average linux distro run about $1 billion.

So the savings of eradicating MSFT products for just three months would, using those numbers, give enough money to start linux from scratch 9 times over and still break out even. The more polished linux distros are now quite a few years ahead of Windows in most areas. In the areas they aren't $9 billion could buy a lot of improvement. Of that hypothetical $9 billion, it wouldn't cost but a fraction to make Filezilla as nice as Fugu or cyberduck.

Oh, but wait. There's the long tail of the worm. The windows worms run for years.

Microsoft products just aren't engineered for security. Xp, Vista and Vista 7 show us that nothing changes on that front. That's not a technical problem any more, that's an HR problem. Get rid of the MSFT boosters and you raise productivty.

That argument isn't actually based on the technical merits, and thus doesn't make any sense..

Just because a Real OS features a Real FS backed up by a real company, doesn't necessarily mean the FS or OS are any good on technical merits compared to a REAL project licensed under a REAL free software license backed up by a REAL community and supported by a REAL foundation.

This would have been to their advantage because it would be very difficult to assign monetary value to something already given away for free

There are ways to gauge this, looks like it would cost 10.8 billion to create Fedora 9.

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/estimatinglinux.php

This is why open source still isn't taken seriously by businesses

Yeah, you're right. No business has made any money off of open source anything, no major business has ever promoted anything opensource.

I mean, Linux and associated applications are from just a bunch of hackers working in their basements. No major business, like IBM, Intel, or HP would bother with this open source shit. None of the people that work on X.org or the Linux kernel have jobs related to this, because business won't take them seriously.

The documents from Microsoft in 1998 were simply a ghost story that coincidentally made reference to a "Linux". No one at Microsoft even knows what Linux is, nor do they care.

... find a way to contribute some small portion of their profits to The Apache Software Foundation?

Or any number of PHP- and Linux-related organizations?

Or Drupal?

That just seems to be the right thing to do, is all.

Linux Standard Base (LSB)

If only the Linux Standard Base existed! Oh, wait, it does!

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/lsb

That is why Skype can build a distro-agnostic package with static linked libraries that just works on every distro, even though they also make distro-specific packages as well.

until the Linux community agrees upon a file structure...

Oh you mean like the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard? The FHS is a file tree standard for Unix systems. Ironically, Apple's OSX is a licensed Unix system that does not conform to the FHS. On the other hand, every general-use or enterprise Linux system conforms to this standard.

...(remember United Linux?)

No, but from a quick google search, it sounds like they were not too successful. The Linux Standard Base is making headway, despite the demise of UnitedLinux, however. The LSB defines uniform packaging specifications for third party vendors. The biggest problem is getting third party vendors to conform, even loosely, to the standards.

List of contributors to the linux kernel : Companies like IBM, Intel, SGI, MIPS, Freescale, HP, etc. are all working to ensure that Linux runs well on their hardware. (source : http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/linuxkerneldevelopment.php ). They clearly are teens in a basement, not professionals.

It's still a mess, though. They put in enough to work to make sure that it works on their hardware, but it's still like the 1 million monkeys on typewriters writing shakespeare. The kernel is always outdated, insecure, and inconsistent. Just because enterprises throw a couple coders its direction doesn't mean it's very competitive technologically. As the quality level of the platform continues to hover between poor to mediocre, I think more companies are going to find professional commercial systems more cost effective.

The boomtown growth of the web 2.0 world is probably over. Cost matters again.

Could you define "modern kernel design" for me ?

A pure microkernel with user-mode drivers, to start out. That's a pretty simple bar right there. Mach is just a microkernel running as a chunk of monolithic kernel. It's a clever way to avoid having to write a modern and secure networking stack, but it's still a crutch.

The linux kernel can not be compiled with visual studio. And the scripts I use dailly are far more easy to write with gnu tools: sh/sed/awk/perl/ruby/tr/gnuplot/make/gcc than with windows tools. But it is possible to do the same thing in windows of course (C is turning complete anyway).

So you develop like people used to in the 70's and early 80's? It's not as though you can't use unix. For instance, Sun offers a much better debugger and profiling tools that still work with gcc and those doesn't cost anything for students.

What I do is a "professional" use of linux since I work with it and people that work with me (in the same university or not) work with it also. Of course, it is still possible to define professional otherwise...

That's funny, you sound an awful lot like a CS undergrad to me.

First of all, I am not looking for employment, I am employed. Thank you very much. If you really are concerned for my employment, high performance computing systems does not run on windows nowadays, but usually in a linux environment. Test done on Ms windows cluster version (or whatever it is called) shows that it is pretty shitty.

The HPC market is tied to economic growth. I suspect Oracle and Microsoft are going to wipe out a lot of the linux market with Solaris and Windows respectively, now that they're focused on HPC. Linux isn't a terribly impressive product in any category, so it's going to be an easy target for well funded enterprises as long as there's growth in the HPC market. I think Microsoft has only started offering competitive products in the HPC line and Oracle is going to manage Sun's assets much better than Sun ever did.

First of all, I am not looking for employment, I am employed. Thank you very much. If you really are concerned for my employment, high performance computing systems does not run on windows nowadays, but usually in a linux environment. Test done on Ms windows cluster version (or whatever it is called) shows that it is pretty shitty.

The linux kernel can not be compiled with visual studio. And the scripts I use dailly are far more easy to write with gnu tools: sh/sed/awk/perl/ruby/tr/gnuplot/make/gcc than with windows tools. But it is possible to do the same thing in windows of course (C is turning complete anyway).

What I do is a "professional" use of linux since I work with it and people that work with me (in the same university or not) work with it also. Of course, it is still possible to define professional otherwise...

If you limit your scope of education to the linux platform, you never will be, either.

My education is not limited to linux. I tried to do low level things in windows and I just know that windows is crappy for that. It lacks automatic configuration tool at fine grain. It lacks good disk I/O performances (even when finely tuned). A couple of years ago infiband performances was a joke (don't know how it works today). I do not even talk about strange architecture such as cell processors, cluster of ARMs or the bluegene architecture. No windows run on that AFAIK.

Mac OS X does not represent modern kernel design by any stretch of the imagination.

Could you define "modern kernel design" for me ?

Windows, on the other hand, has a professionally designed hybrid kernel.

List of contributors to the linux kernel : Companies like IBM, Intel, SGI, MIPS, Freescale, HP, etc. are all working to ensure that Linux runs well on their hardware. (source : http://www.linuxfoundation.org/publications/linuxkerneldevelopment.php ). They clearly are teens in a basement, not professionals.