As eWeek is reporting, the Free Standards Group and OSDL have merged to form the Linux Foundation. It's about time. There has been precisely zero value in having the two organizations functioning separately. OSDL was little more than the big vendors' attempt to remain front-and-center with Linux, and FSG was always more relevant to developers, though a bit hampered by its lack of connection to the big vendors.
Today, they're the same, and I think that's a good thing.
Jim Zemlin (of the FSG) will run the Linux Foundation, which is a big positive, in my view. Jim "gets" Linux and what needs to happen:
I clearly understand what the charter of the organization needs to be: we need to provide services that are useful to the community and industry, as well as protect, promote and continue to standardize the platform.That's right: you can't have industry without community, but you also can't really have community without industry. It's a symbiotic relationship, and one that will be well-served by bringing the two together.
It is still, however, an open question as to how much value any organization can bring to the market, given that the market is already voting for a vendor-sponsored standard, otherwise known as "Red Hat." Jim said:
We need to be innovative in defining a new wave to promote the platform, one in which everyone can participate equally," Zemlin said. "We also need to find a new and interesting way in which to create standards that blend open source upstream standardization—in the form of code collaboration—with downstream customer-facing standards that guarantee, so to speak, certain interfaces exist over time, and test suites to back that up.All true, but it doesn't really address the larger question as to what to do with Red Hat. Red Hat doesn't need the Linux Foundation nearly as much as it needs Red Hat. The real question, then, will be how well the Linux Foundation works with Red Hat. Any attempts to go around it (OSDL is one example, as was United Linux) will fail.
Posted by Matt Asay on January 22, 2007 11:34 AM
