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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.
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.
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?
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
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.
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"
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),
That's one of the main reasons I have never even tried to get into Linux on my own...
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