by Playfuls Staff |
23rd January 2007
Two main open source promoters and supporters, the Open Source Development Labs and Free Standards Group have announced their merger into what will be known as the Linux Foundation.[more]
2006 has been a year in which many changes have taken place at OSDL. The first major change was in March, when OSDL got a new Technical Advisory Board (TAB). Now, probably under the supervising and with the agreement of the same board, the OSDL decided it’s time to join forces with its less-famous brother, the Free Standards Group.
The new merger is expected to be approved by adherents of the two open source organizations in February. The aim of the new OSS-defender is to continue the plans previously established by the two separate entities, and in the same time to find new opportunities in OSS’ never-ending battle with the Windows platform.
Both OSDL and FSG were brought to life 7 years ago, in 2000, but OSDL gained more media attention because of Linus Torvalds, the Godfather of Linux and the open source community. OSDL also had investment backers that included: 7 funders of Computer Associates, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Ltd., Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel Corporation, Nippon Electric Corporation, as well as a large collection of independent software vendors, end-user companies and educational institutions.
In early December, the OSDL announced plans to narrow its focus after laying off just under a third of its staff and after the resignation of CEO Stuart Cohen, who wanted to pursue a career with another organization.
It also plans to help increase usage of Linux by aiding development of the software and helping the operating system work with open-source and proprietary software.
“Linux offers freedom of choice, customization and flexibility without forcing customers into vendor lock-in,” Zemlin said in a statement. “The Linux Foundation helps in the next stage of Linux growth by organizing the diverse companies and constituencies of the Linux ecosystem to promote, protect and standardize Linux.”
Among other purposes, the Linux Foundation is also focused on:
- Standardizing Linux and improving it as a platform for software development
A platform is only as strong as the applications that support it. The Linux Foundation offers application developers standardization services and support that make Linux an attractive target for their development efforts. These include the Linux Standard Base (LSB) and the Linux Developer Network. All major Linux distributions comply with the LSB.- Providing a neutral forum for Collaboration and Promotion
The Linux Foundation serves as a neutral spokesperson to advance the interests of Linux and respond with authority to competitors’ attacks. It also fosters innovation by hosting collaboration events among the Linux technical community, application developers, industry and end users to solve pressing issues facing the Linux ecosystem in such areas as desktop interfaces, accessibility, printing, application packaging, and many others.The Free Standards Group was an industry non-profit consortium chartered to primarily specify and drive the adoption of open source standards.
All standards developed by the Free Standards Group (FSG) were released under open terms (the GNU Free Documentation License with no cover texts or invariant sections) and test suites, sample implementations and other software were released as open source.
Open Source Development Labs was a non-profit organization supported by a global consortium dedicated to the advancement of the operating system called Linux. Founded in 2000, its goals included
"to be the recognized center-of-gravity for the Linux industry" and to serve as "a central body dedicated to accelerating the use of Linux for enterprise computing."The newly announced merger could be a response to last year’s Novell-Microsoft alliance, which is a serious threat to all Linux users, since they are in danger of being sued by the Redmond behemoth for patent infringement.
Microsoft will pay $442 million under the patent and business deals it reached in 2006 with Novell Inc. Under the multiple agreements, Novell, based in Waltham, Mass., will spend a minimum of $40 million over the next five years for patent protections, but the open source community is still worried about how will Microsoft react in the future.
"The Linux and open source market is evolving at a rapid pace but one thing will never change -- the power of collaboration and community to constantly improve technology," said last year Ron Pettit, ex-initiative manager at OSDL. "Because of the efforts of many individuals and companies from the Linux development community, users will gain important improvements to serviceability tools as they enter a new year."
