Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

If Linux Fails, Blame Jim Zemlin

Posted by timothy on from the well-that-might-be-a-little-harsh dept.

darthcamaro writes "Everyone asks who runs Linux — to which the normal answer is either Linus Torvalds or 'the community.' But (as Master Yoda once said) — There is another. His name is Jim Zemlin and he is the Executive Director of The Linux Foundation." From the interview linked above: "'I want to be a thousand percent confident that this organization will be around for the next 30 to 50 years because Linux isn't going away,' Zemlin said. 'It's everywhere, and there is no doubt that Linux will be an important platform in the future and we're only at the beginning on the embedded and mobile side. It will be my screwup if we don't have an organization that can help coordinate and grow the development of the Linux platform.'"

6 of 286 comments (clear)

  1. Not useful in 30 years by Darkness404 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I want to be a thousand percent confident that this organization will be around for the next 30 to 50 years because Linux isn't going away,'

    That is a bad idea. Think about how much has changed in 30 years with technology. Now accelerate that change with the internet, etc. It is a very bad idea for Linux to still be used in 30 to 50 years. Now, there will be some use for it, to see how much software has changed, etc. But for a system written in 1991 to be useful in 2038 it has to have the fundamental architecture changed.

    Will there be an open source OS that is good to be used in 2038? Yes. Is Linux it? Nope. Not unless you still think that the MS-DOS system is still useful today, or that Windows 3.1 laptop.

    --
    Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    1. Re:Not useful in 30 years by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Unix and indeed linux has handled huge amounts of CPUs for ages. The GPU thing is new and interesting, and I don't see why Linux as it stands today should have any problem supporting it - it's most useful for special dedicated tasks, so a userland library should be fine (and probably already exists).

  2. But will it be on the desktop? by FooBarWidget · · Score: 4, Informative

    But will it become an important player on the desktop? I'm using Linux on my laptop every day, and I think it's great. But sadly, desktop Linux has a very small market share these days. In fact desktop Linux is something that people make fun of. Every time something positive about Linux adoption is posted, people respond with "Last year desktop Linux failed, but THIS year is the year of Linux on the desktop... really!!111"

    People on Slashdot, OSNews and many other places are always criticizing Linux for not being desktop friendly. But sadly, it seems that the Linux community isn't exactly helping. There are developers who are clearly interested in making Linux a viable desktop platform, for both users and developers. For example, the Autopackage project has tried for quite some time now to convince distributions to support /usr/local. Yes you read that right: to support /usr/local, a very basic prefix that everybody expects to work, but practice doesn't! The problems with /usr/local includes:
    - Menu item files installed to /usr/local are not recognized by GNOME and KDE by default. A lot of distributions refuse to add /usr/local to the default search path for menu items.
    - File associations: ditto.
    - A bunch of other problems that I don't remember from the top of my head, most of them related to not being included in the default search path.

    Working menu items and file associations are among the basic things required for desktop adoption, are they not? Not having them in the default search path prevents third party software installation to work properly. I'm sure nobody wants to install third party applications to /usr just to make menu items work, right?

    Autopackage has been trying to convince distributions to do just pme simple thing - adding /usr/local to the default search path. Distributors and a lot of people from the Linux community either don't know, don't care, or are actively opposing this effort.

    What are we, developers who care about Linux on the desktop, to do?

    1. Re:But will it be on the desktop? by FooBarWidget · · Score: 2, Informative

      Hm something went wrong with TinyURL. Here's the correct URL: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.autopackage.devel/6831

  3. What? by bmo · · Score: 4, Informative

    Wait, isn't the summary contradicting itself?

    Jim isn't saying that if he fails, Linux will fail. He's saying that "The Linux Foundation" will fail. Linux will go on with or without him, and that's what he's saying in the quote.

    And he's right. Many organizations fail because of bad leadership. The fish rots from the head down.

    I thought that editors were supposed to be steeped in English grammar and should be able to diagram a sentence, thus finding the subject, verb, and object, blindfolded, underwater, with sharks with frikkin laser beams swimming all around.

    Gott im himmel.

    --
    BMO

  4. I don't want any credit but feel free to blame me. by jzemlin · · Score: 5, Informative

    To be clear. I am only responsible for the "Linux Foundation." We all get that credit for Linux success rests with thousands and thousands of people not any single person or organization.

    If the "Linux Foundation" is not helpful then you can blame me for that.

    In addition, feel free to blame me for high gas prices, most of the pot holes in San Francisco, and for the crappy wifi at every single Linux Conference.

    Jim Zemlin