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.'"

Comments

Re:linux sucks

[samcan]

I will have to ask you to turn in your Nerd credentials.

Strategy?

[Elektroschock]

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?

Re:Strategy?

[fishbowl]

>Do they have a strategy against software patents?

This is a natural benefit of "twenty year sustainability."

Re:Strategy?

[Burz]

Do you expect hardware that's made for a Mac to run in a PC?

Actually I expect hardware that's made for a Mac/PC to be clearly indicated as such somewhere. However the Linux Foundation doesn't promote identifying Linux compatibility on the hardware packaging the way MS and Apple do with their respective OSes.

You might say that is so because most of the work for drivers is undertaken by kernel hackers themselves. But said hackers only list the compatible CPUs for the kernel... they do not make any single compatibility reference (HCL) for other devices.

This makes me think that the kernel hackers are really only interested in catering to others like themselves, who don't mind keeping tabs on the kernel mailing list. Their expectations of end-users patience and abilities is entirely unrealistic.

Re:linux sucks

[McGiraf]

That makes Linux better than your girlfriend.

Wow, he does think rather highly of himself...

[QuietLagoon]

It is a shame that his ego is getting in the way of his noting the community's contributions to the Linux environment.

Re:Wow, he does think rather highly of himself...

[gbjbaanb]

I suppose he's going to give it 110% so he can be 1000% confident Linux will be on 500% of all mobile devices.

I was going to say something else but I've forgotten his name already.

Re:Wow, he does think rather highly of himself...

[MRe_nl]

He's obviously 50% sure about the first 20 years, and not so much thereafter.
Probably quit realistic. I should get out Nostradamus to see wat he has to say about it.

Not useful in 30 years

[Darkness404]

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.

Re:Not useful in 30 years

[McGiraf]

Well one would hope that Linux would have evolved in 30 years. Maybe not one line of code from now will still be in it, maybe be it will no be written in C anymore, maybe the kernel version is going to be 2.8 (more likely 2.6.5665454871125114-rc89) but it could well be still around.

Re:Not useful in 30 years

[robo_mojo]

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.

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...)

Re:Not useful in 30 years

[dvh.tosomja]

Of course, Windows 1.0 and Windows Vista share almost nothing in common.

It share new font install dialog

Re:Not useful in 30 years

[dvice_null]

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.

Re:Not useful in 30 years

[Darkness404]

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.

Re:Not useful in 30 years

[hedwards]

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.

Re:Not useful in 30 years

[Repossessed]

I always figured HURD will be ready about the same time Linux finally becomes unmaintainable.

Which means Linux needs to last a lot more than 30 more years.

Re:Not useful in 30 years

[Darkness404]

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.

But Linux wasn't coded in a forward looking fashion. It was coded for a specific machine that Linus had. UNIX was coded in a forward looking fashion, but now it is past the machines that it was trying to get in the future. What we need is an OS that improves on UNIX and Linux. For example, Plan 9 tried to do that (http://plan9.bell-labs.com/wiki/plan9/FAQ/index.html#INTRODUCTION) because some of the flaws of UNIX were too deep to fix with patches, etc.

Re:Not useful in 30 years

[Apple Acolyte]

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.

Re:Not useful in 30 years

[__aaahtg7394]

Maybe not one line of code from now will still be in it

But it will still be SCO's IP!

Re:Not useful in 30 years

[Skreems]

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.

Re:Not useful in 30 years

[Enderandrew]

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.

Re:Not useful in 30 years

[Anonymous Coward]

1988 - 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.

2008 - 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.

2028 - 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.

2048 - 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.

...

2568 - 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.

...

If not now, when?

Re:Not useful in 30 years

[Dragonslicer]

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?

Re:Not useful in 30 years

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Not useful in 30 years

[Anonymous Coward]

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).

Re:Not useful in 30 years

[Skreems]

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.

The desktop years.

[Anonymous Coward]

Can we blame Jim Zemlin for every year that hasn't been the year of the linux desktop?

$IsDesktopLinuxYear = false; //this never changes
while(!$IsDesktopLinuxYear) {

  Slap("Jim Zemlin");
  Sleep(31536000); // omg epic design
}

Re:linux sucks

[r00b]

Linux is my girlfriend you insensitive clod.

Linux is dead, long live Liinux

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:linux sucks

[Zeike]

Linux is the worst OS Except for all the others.

Re:linux sucks

[McGiraf]

Me too, but Windows goes down on me more often.

It has to be said

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

But will it be on the desktop?

[FooBarWidget]

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?

Re:But will it be on the desktop?

[FooBarWidget]

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

Re:But will it be on the desktop?

[JohnBailey]

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.

What?

[bmo]

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

Master Yoda...

[dubz]

But (as Master Yoda once said) â" There is another. His name is Jim Zemlin and he is the Executive Director of The Linux Foundation."

Another there is. Jim Zemlin his name is ...

Re:linux sucks

[nawcom]

Windows goes down on you? Windows usually locks up on me. Rigor mortis ftw.

Yes but...

[nganju]

does he run linux?

Sorry, had to be said.

Re:linux sucks

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

atleast she's tight, everytime I've used Windows lately it's been one open hole after another.

Re:linux sucks

[A.K.A_Magnet]

Winston, your wisdom is infinite :).

Re:The packaging hell

[Enderandrew]

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.
2 - It shouldn't care if the package is a .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.
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 /opt and then another in /bin or /sbin and it gets ridiculous.
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.

Additional filesystem views

[CustomDesigned]

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.

Re:Additional filesystem views

[oilfinder]

Well, I suppose maybe I'm gettin' old, or at least old-fashioned, and probably (mis)formed by years of working how the 'system' told me I was supposed to work, but...
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!

Re:linux sucks

[pcutilisateur]

Oh my lord, it seems Linux is a having threesome with us.

I don't want any credit but feel free to blame me.

[jzemlin]

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

Re:I don't want any credit but feel free to blame

[GaryOlson]

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.

Re:I don't want any credit but feel free to blame

[jd]

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.)