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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.'"
You are forgetting that Linux is an open source project, which is actively developed. It only supported 386 processors at first, but now the list is too long to be posted here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_kernel_portability_and_supported_architectures#List_of_supported_architectures
Old versions of Linux won't be usable after 30 years, but recent versions will be.
While the hierarchical filesystem has been great for programming, it doesn't work so well for end users. I've been coaching customers and my wife on organizing email for decades. Creating folders and filing messages in them is *not* what they want to do. Many are not even capable of it.
What an end users wants to do is not "file" anything any "where". Let the email pile up in the INBOX, and click on columns to sort, or use a query to find emails. Is the imap server not handling that practice efficiently? "Bad imap server", *not* "bad user". (We switched from uw-imap to dovecot since the latter is efficient for multi-gigabyte inboxes.)
In the same vein, users want their desktops to work like email. No folders. Just a desktop view with columns pulled from file content like in thunderbird, instant sorting and searching on any column, and a simple query screen to search by logical combinations of columns. The current filename, filetype, modified, size columns are insufficient. For open office documents, the document properties should be searchable.
So maybe there is not a single set of columns that is useful for all kinds of documents. Maybe the hierarchy should be a class hierarchy. The base class has bare unix file properties (name, modified, size, permissions, etc). Email extends that to add subject, sender, to, etc. Office software extends it to add author, title, subject, lastprinted, revision, template, etc.