jzemlin's blog

Sometimes you need to hit rock bottom before you can get the help you need. IDC acted as an “interventionist” today publishing a new report showing how open source is growing in the down economy.

Linux has a strong history of deployments in government agencies around the globe and has helped drive the adoption of open source applications in government in recent years. But, we have a long, winding road in front of us. Research firm Gartner predicts that only 25% of government vertical, domain-specific applications will either be open source or contain software developed by a community by 2011.

Most of you have seen the news today from Google formally announcing their Chrome Operating System for netbooks using Intel x86 and ARM chips. The is painted as a classic “clash of the titans” between Google and Microsoft, with Google finally directly assaulting Microsoft’s top cash business.

One of the coolest things I get to do in this job is talk to the developers and business executives who are every day advancing the Linux operating system. Our Open Voices Podcast Series showcases some of the most influential people in the Linux and open source software community, including Linus Torvalds, Mark Shuttleworth, Mitchell Baker, and many more.

We don’t need to declare the year of the Linux desktop anymore. This week alone was pretty darn good. Having spent the week at Computex, the place where you see all the things that people are going to find in Bestbuy and Amazon 6 months from now, it is clear that Linux has a critical role in client computing. Here is a shortlist of this weeks developments.

Moblin Breaks Out

You say potato I say; are we really talking about this? At Computex this week we saw two new computing “categories” created. It has long been marketing 101 in the high tech world to try and define a category of computing based on metrics that favor your own particular market position of unique feature set. That is what is going on today in the great netbook/smartbook/low-cost small notebook PC debate. Let’s look at each of these and try and sort this out.

There was an interesting announcement from Eduardo Lima of the Canola project in his speech in Mozilla Maemo Danish Weekend yesterday in Brazil.

Today, the Moblin project released Moblin v2.0 for Netbooks and Nettops to beta. If you haven’t seen the innovation present in Moblin, I urge you to watch this video that showcases the Moblin v2.0 Netbook UI experience.

Today the Linux Foundation issued a joint letter with Microsoft to the American Law Institute regarding a draft of their Principles of the Law of Software Contracts.

Who is the American Law Institute (ALI)

It’s no surprise that the executive director of the Linux Foundation would see good news for Linux in the unexpected announcement this morning of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems, but I do feel it necessary to shed some light on how it may or may not affect Linux.