amcpherson's blog

Contests, at their best, can highlight creative thinking and originality.  In the Linux community, there seems to be an serious overabundance of both.  Four different contests — all starting this January — are doing their best to crowdsource and give out significant prizes to the winners.  Vote, participate, or just soak it all in, these contests are great ways to get involved.  

The last few weeks have seen a number of posts about the health of open source office productivity software Open Office. Michael Meeks, open office developer, started this controversy with his recent blog post on whether Open Office is a “dying horse.”

Last week, we launched the Linux Foundation video site. The site will of course house the growing collection of Linux Foundation original video from our events, but I hope it will also become a place for the Linux community to share their Linux video content. The intention is for it to become the central location for Linux videos, so Linux users and developers can easily find pertinent and educational Linux video information. If you have Linux video, we would appreciate your uploading it to this site.

It never seems to fail: this time of year brings out predictions, and with them debate about the future of Linux, especially on the desktop. It’s a good sign that we go through this back and forth: it shows the wide and diverse community of users, developers and pundits who feel they have a stake in Linux. (Either that or they just need something to write about this time of year.)

So this week, a dozen articles and posts appeared either stating or refuting that this year really will be the year of the Linux desktop.

In this month’s Linux Foundation newsletter:

* IPv6 Workgroup Certifies Major Distros Compliant with DoD Mandates * Technical Advisory Board Elects New Members * Linux Foundation, Open Invention Network Co-Sponsor ‘Linux Defenders’ Program * Linux Foundation in the News * 2009 Linux Foundation Calendar of Events * Linux Foundation Sponsors FreedomHEC * Linux Foundation Holds Japan Symposium

==> IPv6 Workgroup Certifies Major Distros Compliant with DoD Mandates <==

I may work at the Linux Foundation, but I have never publicly been caught saying 2009 (or 2008, or 2007 etc) would be the year of the Linux desktop. (I’ve never even said it privately even though I use a Linux desktop everyday.) While Linux is an important desktop option and companies such as Novell have made significant corporate wins, it has failed to garner enough users on the desktop to put a significant dent in Microsoft’s marketshare. One of the key reasons for that has been most corporations standardizing on Windows.

For those of you who haven’t heard, Barack Obama will be the first president to have a laptop on his desk at the oval office. (He does however have to give up his trusted Blackberry.)

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in a conversation with Arianna Huffington on MSNBC, today said that he hopes Obama uses a Mac and not a PC. Excuse me Eric (and Arianna) isn’t there another option you may be missing?

In this month’s Linux Foundation newsletter:

* Linux Foundation publishes guide to participating in Linux community * Linux valued at $10b by new Linux Foundation white paper * Linux Foundation holds successful first End User Summit * The flagship LSB portability tool Linux Application Checker is released * The Linux Foundation launches Linux Developer Network beta * CME Group, Nokia, and Canonical among many making membership moves * Linux Fast Boot Developments

Next week, our Linux Foundation Japan office hosts the Linux Foundation Japan Symposium, an event that was started to bring leading Linux luminaries to present and interact with local senior software developers, with the goal of increasing open source participation by talented Japanese developers. The result of these events is the widening of a global Linux community, which benefits everyone.

Two weeks ago we published a research paper estimating the development cost of a community Linux distribution. It was a fantastic project for the three of us who worked on it. The findings were surprising, even to me. It would take over $10 billion for a company to develop the software represented in Fedora 9.