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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.'"
I will have to ask you to turn in your Nerd credentials.
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?
That makes Linux better than your girlfriend.
It is a shame that his ego is getting in the way of his noting the community's contributions to the Linux environment.
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"); // omg epic design
Sleep(31536000);
}
Linux is my girlfriend you insensitive clod.
Me too, but Windows goes down on me more often.
Of course, Windows 1.0 and Windows Vista share almost nothing in common.
It share new font install dialog
Windows goes down on you? Windows usually locks up on me. Rigor mortis ftw.
atleast she's tight, everytime I've used Windows lately it's been one open hole after another.
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
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.
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