Forming of the Linux Foundation (by James Bottomley)
We thought you might be interested to read some of the background on how OSDL and FSG came together to form the Linux Foundation and what I view as the benefits of the new organization. Late last year (actually, in Tokyo, Japan where they were both having reasonably close by board meetings) the Open Source Development Laboratories and the Free Standards Group came together for a brief meeting to discuss the merits of undergoing a merger. Following this successful meeting, a merger committee was set up by both organisations with a tight timetable for completing the transaction (the ideal being to have the definitive agreement executed by early February). One of the main reasons the merger was so appealing to both organisations was the desire to consolidate all the industry resources at a single point to concentrate on promotion, protection and standardisation of Linux (in the old model, standardisation belonged to the FSG and promotion and protection to OSDL, but both organisation had some overlap in pursuing their respective goals). From the point of view of the Kernel Community, the merger creates a single "go to" organisation for tacking any problems that appear (be they in the legal spectrum, such as patents and licensing, or in the must-do category such as the OSDL fellowship programme for supporting key maintainers, like Linus, as well as the directed fellowship fund for focusing resources on areas of Linux that need it, like the current quest for a person to work on kernel documentation) in the drive to move Linux onwards. From the point of view of the funders of these organisations, the single "go to"organisation is also appealing because it represents the one place to send funding in order to achieve most of their external goals with regard to Linux. It is also significant that the creation of the unified Linux Foundation comes just as Linux is being recognised as a key player by Microsoft; thus it becomes increasingly important to Linux in the mainstream that there exists an organisation to answer the standard corporate queries about intellectual property and sustainability of the Open Source model and to counter some of the marketing propaganda of corporations who now regard Linux as a serious competitive rival. Finally, as far as the future of Linux goes, the evolution of the Linux Foundation is a positive development that marks the completion of the initial maturation of linux from a hobby to a secure, robust and apposite operating system solution to the mainstream global needs. The job of the Linux Foundation going forward will be to help navigate Linux through these growing pains into the mainstream and beyond while preserving the excitement and innovation of being an upstart based on volunteer contributions that propelled it so far and so fast in the first place.
