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Ask The Linux Foundation's Executive Director Jim Zemlin What You Will
In addition to sponsoring the work of Linus Torvalds, The Linux Foundation supports and promotes a wide variety of resources and services for Linux. Their recently released 2014 Linux Jobs Report surveyed more than 1,000 managers and corporations, finding in part, that the demand for "Linux Professionals" was up 70% from last year. Jim Zemlin is the Executive Director of the Linux Foundation and he has agreed to answer any questions that you have about the report and the state of Linux in general. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.
What year will be known as The Year of Linux on the Desktop?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
Regarding Linux kernel...
Is there a fear of some kind of fragmentation after Linus leadership ends ?
I'm not saying Linus will stop leading anytime soon, but this will happen one day for sure.
Maybe not a fear, but concerns, ..., call it.
I want to know what he thinks of the new SlashDot beta
He thinks it sucks. Everyone thinks it sucks.
Is there an impact on Linux, is the development being influenced by US Department of Defense and NSA?
Conspiratorial view on Linux security:
Is the Linux foundation doing anything to insure the various distributions each incorporate the improvements done in the various distributions?
I'm worried about the long term branching side effects. We have Debian, Red Hat, Oracle, and others adding functions and improvements.
What is being done to insure both hybrid vigor and "re-mainlining" of promising branches?
Couldn't Linux do that as well then?
How many times has Richard Stallman emailed you to tell you it should be called "The GNU/Linux Foundation"?
Coder's Stone: The programming language quick ref for iPad
One thing I'm curious about - is the Linux Foundation keeping a tab to ensure that driver support is there for as many devices as possible under Linux, so that the chances of something not working under Linux is minimal? This is obviously not an issue w/ Windows, since device manufacturers target it for their devices, but one can easily see devices not being recognized by Linux. Sometimes, the recognition may vary from one version to other, or distro to distro. What, if anything, does the Linux foundation do to ensure maximum coverage, regardless of version or device?
A related thing I was interested in knowing - usually, there are version mismatches if one tries to install a certain version of ALSA on a certain version of Linux. Can't sound be made an integral part of the Linux kernel so that one doesn't need to install ALSA or Pulse Audio or other such workarounds?
There is a number of companies that have been attacking Linux with patent claims and FUD to make the OS less attractive to manufacturers and even companies acting as end users. Some even demanded fees or a tax for the usage of Linux to avoid litigation, reaching secret agreements instead of invalidating the patents or working around them. This doesn't benefit Linux at all, leaves it under a bad light and leaves a uncertainty that a company can get sued anytime for using the OS in their products. Why does the Linux Foundation not react to this, or if it does what has been done so far and what will be done in future? Have you considered leading such fight, or rising funds (crowd-funding) to invalidate patents? Can the secret agreements between companies be stopped in any way to not cause more harm to Linux? Like if a company claims that Linux violates their patents push them to know exactly which ones and work around them.
Can the Linux Foundation do anything to ensure that there is some uniformity b/w distros? For instance, for some of them, one can find certain configuration files available under /etc/, and w/ other distros, they get moved about. Can the Linux Foundation set up a definition where things just have to be in certain locations, regardless of distro, and certain commands that just have to work, regardless of distro? The distro makers can innovate outside these parameters, but to be recognized as 'Linux', they absolutely have to follow certain conventions? In short, have something like UNIX's branding program, maybe w/o the fees?
There are many things Linux can't do thanks to political barriers, not technical ones. An example is backing up or just playing a copy protected DVD. CSS and region encoding are easily overcome. It's schemes like ARccOS that cause difficulties. Another example is the mess NVidia and AMD/ATI have made of graphics drivers. Theyve pledged to improve, but they've dragged their feet so much one wonders how serious they are. Maybe no legitimate business will ever again dare to pull stunts like Sony's music CDs with the root kit, and Turbo Tax's fooling around with the zero sector of their customers' hard drives, but they aren't yet scared or enlightened enough to stop trying other crap.
Many software and hardware companies feel they can safely ignore libre OSes. Worse, some still view libre as antithetical to standard business practices, and a death sentence for their business if they so much as use it. To them, libre is hippie pinko Communist. The walled gardens of the likes of Microsoft and Apple are philosophically more comfortable. They don't just accidentally create software that cannot be easily ported, they purposely do that.
How do you get businesses and people to play ball with libre software? I want the attitudes that go with intellectual property and copy protection to die, and the very concepts to be so abhorrent that no self-respecting business will ever again think it an ethical and righteous thing to do. Freedom of speech and religion are accepted and enforced. Freedom of knowledge deserves the same.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
What if anything do you think Linux should do to improve network security?
The reason I ask this question is runtime environments allow and require (depending on the tools your using) programmers to be experts in memory management and systems programming, but by and large the vast majority are not. This leads to zero day exploits hiding in various applications - including application layer parts of the OS. Is anyone giving thought to prevention, instead of chasing bugs after the fact, and what will that look like in the future?
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
security model? One that will allow users to invoke lightweight sandboxes for untrusted applications like browsers? Linux has the opportunity to be the leader in this field. Should your foundation push for it?
I know Linux is all about freedom, especially freedom of choice, but is The Linux Foundation doing anything actively to encourage consolidation instead of fragmentation to avoid the situation Randall Munroe describes in xkcd?
...
The current situation: Distributions galore, a profusion of system initialization versions from simple to incomprehensible, a plethora of desktop metaphors (probably stopping this year and next year from being The Year of the Linux Desktop),
Don't be hyperbolic. Plenty of people have no desire to visit Slashdot and couldn't care less.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
No, that's planned for NEXT year...
it's ALWAYS next year..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Why does Linux seem like a solution looking for a problem?
Because you obviously don't know how to ask the right questions and have failed to understand history. Where do you think Micro$oft would be if they hadn't had a better target to shoot for? Linux, if nothing else, is that target. So like it or not, Linux has helped even Windows users get better software.
Also, LInux is used more in consumer devices than you might imagine. Linux is light weight, consumes less resources and provides excellent network support which makes it ideal for routers, "smart" TV's, phones, and appliances of all kinds. It flies your airplanes, provides your entertainment and touches the vast majority of data flowing over the internet. You literally could NOT live without it very long. (unless you grow your own food and are 100% off grid).
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
No need to change Slashdot at all. The old way works great and I would like it to stay that way.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
That's one of the main reasons I have never even tried to get into Linux on my own...
Which sucks more, systemd or slashdot beta?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
When will Linux auto-detect the 'static' components of the hardware and do an install with a kernel compiled and optimized for that hardware - along with a vanilla kernel for emergency backup? (Something like Gentoo does)
Never - it is not in a general distros best interest. It is hard enough keeping on top of the kernel bugs with a signle configuration in use, let alone customising it to everyones hardware. Anyway, when it comes to drivers, the optimisations you can do are "dont load drivers you dont need", which is what already happens
Why is Linux still less than 1% of the desktop market that it was supposed to dominate so assuredly some, oh, 20 years ago?
What is being done to improve the Linux Kernel documentation in both structure and completeness?
A good white paper was already written about what needs to be improved and yet the mailing list discussions are just endless bike shedding. Here is the white paper:
https://www.kernel.org/doc/ols... There appears to be no person who the buck stops with. Furthermore based on 3 years of reading the mailing list I seriously doubt more than 2-5 people on the mailing list actually understand what good documentation is, let alone how to write it.
Push harder towards Open Media/Content
Textual interaction with programs is the default, which is perfectly normal to a programmer, but completely opaque to the uninitiated.
No it isn't; your post sounds like you just stepped out of 1997 at the very latest. My wife uses Linux every day, and has absolutely no clue how to use the command line. Thanks to KDE, she doesn't have to; for web browsing, working with office documents, basic file management, and other basic computer uses, it serves her purposes perfectly, without all the annoyances and headaches that come with Windows.
If being able to (god help you) fine tune your init scripts doesn't strike a deep chord of joy in your heart, then Linux may not be for you.
This is total crap. You don't have to be able to mess with init scripts (which are going away soon anyway with systemd), or anything else of the sort, to be a regular Linux user. Lots of corporate and government office workers use Linux every day and don't mess with any kind of system administration tasks. That stuff is all available, and isn't going anywhere (provided you have root access, not something you'd get on a normal office machine, but which you would retain on your home system), but it isn't necessary at all with a modern distro.
OpenStack has been compared to Linux a lot lately and justifiable so. I'd be interested in your thoughts on what the Linux Foundation can learn from the structures built within the OpenStack Foundation. Specifically, the OpenStack Foundation has a User Committee with the mission to look after the user's interest. That is: not developers, nor industry partners but users. Would you consider a similar function to be the Linux Foundation's concern?