The Linux Foundation Borrows Novell's Linux CTO for 18 Months

Published: July 31, 2007

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

Unix operating system and server maker Sun Microsystems stole away Ian Murdock from The Linux Foundation this past March, leaving the newly constituted foundation missing a chief technology officer. Novell, which was a member of both the Free Standards Group and the Open Systems Development Labs that merged to create the foundation in January, is going to lend a hand.

Specifically, Markus Rex, who is chief technology officer for the Open Platform Solutions Group at Novell and who was one of the cornerstone executives named to the Linux Foundation board of directors back in April, is going to take a hiatus from Novell and work as CTO for the Linux Foundation. Rex is one of the key techies behind the SUSE Enterprise Linux Server distribution, and is the top executive that remains at the formerly independent SUSE since Novell bought the German Linux distro in November 2003 for $210 million.

Rex fills a hole left by Murdock, who is one of the co-creators of the Debian Linux variant. Murdock has been a strong proponent of standards in the Linux and open source community for many years, and in February 2006, he took the job as CTO at the Free Standards Group to try to shepherd Linux standards. Subsequent to the merger of the FSG with OSDL, a vendor consortium that supports Linux and other open source standards and funds development of the Linux kernel and various other software layers that are important to the Linux stack, but before the Linux Foundation announced its board, Murdock was named CTO at the foundation, and then jumped over to Sun to become its chief operating platforms officer. Among other things, Murdock is imparting his deep knowledge of how Linux works and, perhaps more importantly, how the Linux community works as he acts as the liaison between Sun, the OpenSolaris development project, and the wider open source community.

"We're extremely thrilled to have Markus Rex join our management team," said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation in a statement. "Rex has been a leader in the Linux industry since the early days of Linux, having joined SUSE Linux AG in 1999 and making it one of the leading commercial distributions on the market today. We appreciate Novell's willingness to lend its technical and financial support to the community with this initiative and hope it serves as a model for the future. Much like open source development itself, this unique approach allows us to neutrally leverage talented personnel from the Linux ecosystem for the greater benefit of Linux Foundation members."

Rex had a team of 15 developers when he joined SUSE back in 1999, a team that had grown to over 200 developers in 2004 in the wake of the Novell acquisition, when Rex was vice president and general manager for SUSE Linux. Rex will lead all technical aspects of the Linux Foundation, most importantly the continued development of the Linux Standard Base standard, which aims to keep Linux from forking like Unix did. Rex is slated to return to his duties at Novell at the end of 2008.

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