Cornerstones Laid for the Linux Foundation

Published: April 3, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Having formed the Linux Foundation back in January, a merger of the former Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group, the Linux players, including the individuals who work on the Linux kernel and related programs and the IT industry vendors who make Linux distributions and sell services for or hardware that runs Linux, have taken the next step and chosen a board of directors the reflects the mix of parties that have vested interests in the further development and success of Linux.

The Linux Foundation was formed to give Linux development a tighter focus, but also to remove some redundancies and to provide a single point of contact for those contributing to the Linux cause. Open Source Development Labs was an industry consortium established in 2000 established key IT vendors who wanted to get a hand in steering the development of Linux and other open source programs, while the Free Standards Group, the home of the Linux Standards Base, a specification that has the goal of keeping Linux implementations from forking.

Back in December, Stuart Cohen, who was in charge of the OSDL, quit that job after laying off nine of 57 employees a little less than a year ago. Jim Zemlin, who was the director of the FSG, was tapped to be the leader of the Linux Foundation, which might explain Cohen's departure in December from OSDL. Any consortium that hopes to get the industry behind it has to have a board of directors with real power that reflect that industry, and the board that Zemlin has put together certainly can be said to do that.

"It is essential that the Linux Foundation's board bring every Linux constituency's issues and opportunities to the table," said Zemlin in a statement announcing the board. "With leadership from the kernel, legal, user, distro, and vendor communities, the Linux Foundation synthesizes the top priorities of its diverse constituencies to provide services that move Linux even further ahead in today's competitive market. We have ensured that a diversity of interests is represented on our board."

The board is comprised of the following people:

• James Bottomley, vice president and chief technology officer at SteelEye Technology, which makes clustering software for Linux and Windows. Bottomley is the maintainer of the Linux SCSI subsystem, the MCA subsystem, the Linux Voyager port and the 53c700 driver, and is the Linux Foundation's technical advisory board representative.
• Wim Coekaerts, the director of Linux engineering at Oracle who oversees Unbreakable Linux and who is working on the Cluster File System that is being added to Linux.
• Masahiro Date, a general manager at Fujitsu who has been involved in operating systems development there and who also oversees the company's Solaris and Linux strategies.
• Doug Fisher, vice president of the Software and Solutions Group at Intel, who spearheads the chip maker's Linux and open source initiatives as well as its virtualization strategy.
• Dan Frye, vice president of open systems development at IBM, who was one of the key people that argued way back in 1999 that IBM had to embrace Linux and open source.
• Tim Golden, the senior vice president at Bank of America who is coordinating that company's deployment of open source software.
• Hisashi Hashimoto, the section manager at Hitachi who is responsible for workstations and mainframes and who runs its Open Source Software Technology Center.
• Christine Martino, vice president of the Open Source & Linux Organization at Hewlett-Packard, which steers engineering, marketing, open source community participation, and indemnity and IP protection programs for the company.
• Marc Miller, open source software expert at AMD and the person in charge of its developer outreach program.
• Brian Pawlowski, vice president and chief technology officer of production operations for Network Appliances, who used to work on open storage protocols at his prior company, Sun Microsystems, and who is the co-author of the NFS Version 3 specification.
• Markus Rex, chief technology officer for the Linux and Open Source Group at Novell.
• Tsugikazu Shibata, senior manager at electronics giant and server maker NEC, who has managed proprietary operating systems for mainframes and supercomputers and who runs the company's Open Source Software Promotion Center.
• Mark Shuttleworth, founder of Canonical, the commercial support organization for the Ubuntu variant of Linux.
• Andrew Updegrove, co-founder and partner in the Gesmer Updegrove law firm, which focuses on intellectual property and open source legal issues.
• Christy Wyatt, vice president of ecosystem and market development for mobile devices at Motorola.

No foundation can have everyone represented, and no board can have every key person or industry player. But Red Hat's absence is peculiar, given that it sells more Linux services than any other distro combined. Similarly, Dell, which has a sizeable Linux server business, has not thrown its weight behind the Linux Foundation yet, but now that it is beginning to sell Linux-based PCs, there is a chance that the company will become more active on the Linux front in an effort to restore its fortunes.

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