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If Linux Fails, Blame Jim Zemlin
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.'"
Do they have a strategy against software patents?
Do they lobby for open standards regulations and vendor neutrality?
Nuff said. ...ah and where is the Desktop LSB gone?
It is a shame that his ego is getting in the way of his noting the community's contributions to the Linux environment.
Unix didn't die because Linux came along.
Mainframe isn't dead -- far from it. It didn't die because Unix came along.
Torvalds has about 50 years left on this earth. Something else will undoubtedly come along that will grab mind and market share. Perhaps it'll come during his lifetime. Whether it does or not it probably won't spell the death of Linux.
It's too early to pick who to blame if Linux fails.
Linux is the worst OS Except for all the others.
That thing you usually call Linux is actually GNU/Linux. Hell, GNU alone would be a much better name than Linux alone.
So the real "leader" is Richard Stallman, not that guy.
Linux 2.6 is not Linux 1.0.
In 30 years there may still be Linux, but it will be Linux 5.2.
(or maybe Linux 2.6.4159 if Linus never changes his versioning again...)
Yes but there comes a time that we have to get rid of UNIX and come up with something better. Today isn't the time to do it, and perhaps 20 years down the road isn't time to do it either, but eventually we have to come up with something that addresses some of the flaws of UNIX.
With Linux being open source, compatibility shouldn't be much of a problem to port applications to the new kernel.
The problem is, when you rely on ideas made in the '80s and code written in the '90s it doesn't help you solve the problems in the 2030s.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
But Windows still shares some of the same design flaws as previous Windows versions. Heck, even NT still shares some of the flaws in DOS. Linux, being a UNIX-like OS will share some of the same flaws as UNIX. Now, UNIX doesn't seem to have as many flaws as DOS-based systems did, but I imagine that by 2038 we will have found them and will need a totally new system. And yes, Linux 1.0 and Linux 2.6 share little to no code, but they share the same design, and there will come a time that UNIX is a bad design for the current technology.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I disagree, I'd be surprised if there were as much change to computers in 30 years as there has been in the last 20 or so. And BSD and Linux have been around for most of that. Sure they've changed, but most of the changes left to make are based upon what's already been done or to the UI.
BSD works at least as well now as it did when it was just patches to Unix, and that was decades ago. There've been quite a few significant changes since then, and the OS has kept up fine.
Linux doesn't have quite the maturity, but it's been around for like 17 years, and last time I booted it up, the distro was doing a fine job of what I wanted it to do. Definitely significantly better than when I toyed around with it five years ago.
Any OS which is coded in a forward looking fashion can keep up with changes over the years as long as changes and fixes are made when they become necessary. And there's somebody there to make the changes. Expecting to wait 10 years to fix architecture problems does not lead to good results.
How do you know for a fact that Unix (based OSs) won't be able to cut it in 30 years? It seems to me that you're advocating radical theoretical change down the line just for the sake of radical change. There's no proof that Unix will necessarily be outmoded by then. If civilization survives another 50 years, we'll probably still be using a lot of the same types of technology we use now.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
Well, right now it's the '00s, and we're still using hardware architecture created in 1978 (8086 processor). Sure, we've added a couple registers and made the existing ones bigger, but it's fundamentally the same system it always was. Why does the HAVE to be a time when we get rid of UNIX? Reinventing the wheel doesn't get you nearly as far as building incrementally on what you've already got, which is the biggest strength of OSS.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
Look how resistant people are to changing the file hierarchy in any *nix based system. People claim that once you know the *nix standard, you can administer it well enough, but that doesn't change there are several exceptions to it, and unnecessary redundancy. Not to mention it was designed around a precept that directory names should be three characters or less.
If Linux isn't Unix, and has no desire to be certified as Unix, then why fight so hard for all the POSIX standards? At some point, shouldn't Linux say "how do we become the best OS we can be, without tethering ourselves to things that aren't helping us?"
And I'm not suggesting abandoning standards wholesale for no reason, but the file system structure really needs improvement.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
This is why the Linux Foundation should be working with distros to actually support the LSB. Find out why they don't currently support it better now, what their gripes are, and try to draft a new version of the LSB that people can center around.
1 - I'd love to see one major package management system. .deb or a .rpm, though the distinction there shouldn't be necessary anymore. .deb was created because of problems with .rpm that don't really exist anymore, and the LSB does say people are supposed to standardize around .rpm, though it certainly wouldn't be impossible for one package manager to read both .deb and .rpm files. /opt and then another in /bin or /sbin and it gets ridiculous.
2 - It shouldn't care if the package is a
3 - Package management should know how to handle source packages with a recipe/ebuild/instructions to build it from source.
4 - There need to be better standards for where files are kept. This is a major failing of the FHS in Linux, because of the redundancy and exceptions, one distro will put something in
5 - Linux will never have much of a coordinated marketing effort because it is so fragmented, but the Linux foundation could work with and encourage marketing for each major distro to help raise visibility of the brand.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Well, right now it's the '00s, and we're still using hardware architecture created in 1978 (8086 processor).
You could probably go back farther than that. The basic concepts of Von Neumann's digital computer are what, almost 70 years old now?
Gather round, car analogy coming in.
S'pose you're an auto engineer driving along a very, very long highway with a rather nice car--that was made almost 40 years ago, and finally became usable more than 20 years ago. It works, but you've had to rebuild it. Several times. It's had myriad improvements, but there's kinks that just refuse to be ironed out--for example, it's rumored that the whole thing will explode in 2038, for whatever reason.
You're deeply, deeply attached to this car, even though it can be hot-wired and driven away when you rest at a pitstop with not too much effort. You'd too busy laughing at the guy in the Vega in the next parking spot to care.
Suddenly, you get word that a shop is working on another, even nicer car. It's one from the future. It'll run forever, prove impenetrable to car thieves, runs _much_ faster than your old car--and it's waiting for you to work on it. Go on, they'll get done faster if you help them.
Except you have to stop and help them first, and by the time you're done you could've covered another three thousand miles that the new one could've covered in a quarter of the time.
Why bother reinventing the wheel, indeed.
Oh, and you're a moron if you think Core is an 8086 with more and bigger registers.
The Core has different stuff under the hood, but the interface to the OS is still remarkably similar to the original 8086, and what differences there are follow a logical progression from the original design. I'm not saying things shouldn't improve, but when you talk about reinventing UNIX, you're presumably claiming that the basic interfaces that tie it to the hardware or the application layer need to be reinvented as well, which is foolish.
Slashdot needs a "-1, Wrong" moderation option.
The Urban Hippie
From a perusal of the Linux Foundation website, I will address an aspect I believe you have not emphasized adequately: Linux in Education. University faculty do not have time to develop coursework or supplemental materials for a single software platform -- be it Linux, Oracle, Visual C#, etc. Much of the software used in education has been specifically created with the educational market in mind. Googling for relevant Linux material is not the answer either.
If you are serious about being helpful, the Linux Foundation website needs an entire section directly devoted to helping teachers, faculty, and educational staff.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Sigh, 7 replies later and I'm still getting this kind of one-liner replies. Maybe you people don't care about Linux on the desktop after all?
Nope.. Too busy using it and enjoying myself. And next week I'm going to be installing a Linux distro on an old PC for a friend who wants to connect it up to his TV. So add another Linux user to the tally :-)
You are getting the one liners because you are taking it far too seriously, and people are making fun of you. I have no idea how long you have been a Linux user, but to be honest, you give the impression of someone who has just discovered it, and now sees it as your vocation in life to convert the world.
The year of Linux thing is a running joke. Nobody with any sense takes it seriously. Non Linux users make the year of Linux joke, non OSX users wind OSX users up by suggesting that Apple might not be perfect, and watch the rationalisations. And everyone laughs at Vista. This is the way of things.. forums are hotbeds of petty arguments and ill informed arguments. If a requirement for posting on /. was to have a valid point, then there wouldn't be very many posts.
Linux is not.....
A universal OS that every person on the planet should use..At gunpoint if required.
We want people to come and use Linux, so we talk about it. But only if it is right for them. If it isn't they have alternatives to use. And I hope they have a good time using their computers. researching a motherboard for Linux compatibility is not everyone's idea of a fun time.
The OS that is going to kill Microsoft...
They are far more likely to do that themselves. They lost me and many others at WGA, and quite a few others with Vista. And no doubt, future actions will make even more Linux users.
A cure for baldness..
Although some of the problems that I have had certainly contributed to my lack of follicle count from time to time.
Relax, enjoy Linux. Do cool stuff, and brag about it. Write a howto if you can, so others can do the same cool stuff. And if a distro doesn't do what you want, try another. If you enjoy Linux, by all means help someone to get up and running with it, but don't try to convert someone to Linux because it is Linux. Do it because it suits the individual person's use of their computer better. It's an operating system, not a religion.
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.
How about this - I won't blame you, but I WILL blame some of the egotistical b* who have happily caused harm to Linux and the free software movement in order to plunder corporations and organizations and destroy genuine attempts at real innovation for the sake of raking in the cash and fluffing up their egos. You've probably encountered some, I certainly have. I won't name names because I happen to know they can afford considerably better lawyers, and some accusations are - by nature - rather hard to prove. But if Linux fails, it is because it has been sabotaged from within, it is because innovators and inventors are being given a raw deal far too often.
(Yes, I'm extremely angry. Not at just one person, but many who feel that they are far more important than the free software that they ride the coat-tails of. Over the past 12 years, I've seen enough to convince me that Linux' success is by the fortune of competent, ethical developers outnumbering the highway robbers. The Linux Foundation and its members' biggest contribution will be on how well they ensure it stays that way.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I want folders! I do exactly the opposite of what you describe. I file my files and e-mails in (for me) logical hierarchies of directories (that what we called them folders when you were still wearing diapers, boy). I hate 'my documents', because it doesn't show me where it fits in the hierarchy (which disk, which sub-dir etc..). I have work, private and archive pst files in Outlook, each with folders per topic or project and I (usually) know where to look for a particular e-mail. And I've never understood the desire to put everything in one 'Explorer' which changes columns depending on what you're looking at, or 'unified search engines' (No Google Desktop or WDS for me!). If I'm looking for an e-mail I'll go to the relevant Outlook folder, and occasionally search for it (Outlook has the relevant fields for finding e-mails). If I'm looking for a file, I'll go to the relevant directory, or if need be, use find or Windows search, which have the relevant fields for finding files. Makes sense to me...
Now get of my lawn with your newfangled search-don't-file ideas!