Direct from the Executive Director

It is hard for the executive director of the Linux Foundation to feel bad for Microsoft, but they are having a bad week while Linux continues to move forward in innovative ways into new markets for computing. Let’s take a look at the difference between Microsoft and Linux this week:

Intel announced today (Thursday) its plans to partner with the Taiwanese government and invest in the island nation’s IT industry to launch an Open Source Software Development Center for mobile devices. Building on Taiwan’s undisputed role as a leading center for creating connected consumer devices, CEO Paul Otellini indicated that Intel had signed an agreement with the Taiwan Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA). MOEA and Intel will establish a center for enabling Moblin and other OSS optimized for devices based on the Intel Atom.

Intel announced today (Thursday) its plans to partner with the Taiwanese government and invest in the island nation’s IT industry to launch an Open Source Software Development Center for mobile devices. Building on Taiwan’s undisputed role as a leading center for creating connected consumer devices, CEO Paul Otellini indicated that Intel had signed an agreement with the Taiwan Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA). MOEA and Intel will establish a center for enabling Moblin and other OSS optimized for devices based on the Intel Atom.

For those that decry the constant prediction of the “year of the Linux desktop” I am happy to say that next year Linux may actually ship on more desktops than Windows or the Mac. That is right, I said next year. What is driving this? Two words: fast boot.

The Economics

Earlier today, Linux Foundation member IBM announced its adoption of a new
corporate policy that will govern its global participation in the standards
development process. It also revealed a list of standards reform
recommendations generated through a discussion among 70 standards experts
from around the world, and called upon all stakeholders, from the open
source community, to vendors, to government, to academia, to join in a
dialogue that can both raise the bar for standards development as well as

Sometimes a consortium can play a smaller supportive role that is really powerful. Helping people and organizations to pull together in the same direction can accomplish amazing things. It’s very gratifying.

This week we saw news centered around two studies on desktop computing trends: one from Forrester Research and one from IDC. Both reports come from highly regarded firms and both seem to point to contradictory trends.

First let me state the obvious. If Google’s new browser is successful then the desktop operating system just became a lot less important. This is great news for Linux.

The Linux Foundation will be hosting our first ever End User Collaboration Summit this October in New York.

This forum is designed for sophisticated users of Linux who will be able share best practices about how they are using Linux and speak directly with the core developers of the Linux platform.

Declaring victory for the Linux desktop at the end of the day will based upon looking at market penetration of Linux based clients vs. Windows and other operating systems. I believe this is still the best measure but we may finally be able to declare this year the breakout of the Linux desktop.

When Apple launched the 3G iPhone, I must confess, I went out and purchased one. I need a smart phone for work, I need one that works both in the United States and Japan, and the consumer electronic design from Apple floored me. The screen is exquisite. The video playback is outstanding. The mobile web experience is second to none. I realize I am in a walled garden, but what a pretty walled garden it is.

While everyone is talking about the fact that Jerry Sienfled has signed up to pitch Microsoft Vista it is worth noting another ad campaign that Microsoft launched last week entitled the “Mojave Experiment.” This type of advertising goes back ages and is generally used to show people that they will actually like something that they thought they disliked. In other words Microsoft feels that Vista has a bad rap due to a lot of “FUD” in the market about Vista’s poor performance, lack of security, difficulty to use, etc.

Walking around Linuxworld this year it was interesting to see the number of Apple notebooks in the halls and various sessions. It wasn’t necessarily that there were more Apple notebooks than Linux machines, but it was a good number and begs the question: why do open source people seem to cut Apple some slack when it comes to their very closed proprietary platform?

LinuxWorld kicks off tomorrow in San Francisco. In many ways, it has a real “State of the Union” feel to it, being one of the oldest shows devoted exclusively to Linux technologies and business trends.

Intuit has joined in promoting Linux with their new Linux Business Resource web site. Intuit has clearly caught on to something we have known for some time. According to their web site:

Michael Arrington over at Techcrunch is throwing down the gauntlet to produce a “dead simple and dirt cheap touch screen web tablet to surf the web. Nothing fancy like the Dell latitude XT, which costs $2,500. Just a Macbook Air-thin touch screen machine that runs Firefox and possibly Skype on top of a Linux kernel. It doesn’t exist today, and as far as we can tell no one is creating one.

If you work around Linux regularly, in some ways the latest amazing news is… not that amazing. The New York Stock Exchange, where the world’s largest public companies trade their stocks, is now running on Linux. (Microsoft is not listed on the NYSE; they trade on the NASDAQ. Now *that* would have been a fun headline…) In addition the Chicago Mercantile Exchange also runs on Linux. While perhaps not as famous as the NYSE, the CME is one of the largest exchanges in the world. Even the Tokyo Stock Exchange is running on Linux.