When Stuart Cohen signed on as chief executive of Open Source Development Labs in April, he didn’t think so much of his time would be occupied with the actions of a small Utah-based company called the SCO Group. Read his interview at News.com.
Linux’s “Center of Gravity”
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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You now employ Linus Torvalds, founder and leader of the Linux operating system, and Andrew Morton, who is clearly one of the key lieutenants, being in charge of the new 2.6 kernel. Can we expect any more high-profile programmers to come on board at OSDL?
As part of our mission to become the center of gravity for Linux, I thought that it was very important that we do our fair share of work within the development community.
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We have some excellent kernel developers that work for us by adding Andrew and Linus.
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Obviously, it provides us leadership and advice and counsel.
“The OSDL name is Open Source Development Labs as opposed to the Linux Development Labs. Can we expect that you are going to be going into other areas of the open-source programming software collection–for example, Web severs or office software?”
“Our focus is really on Linux and Linux-based applications. That is where the market interest is; that is where our customers wants us to focus, and that is really where the exhilaration is.”
It’s too bad the attitude isn’t that of being the center of opensource software instead of just Linux and the Linux desktop. It would be nice to see OpenOffice, Gnome, and KDE (as well as many others) to be based in the same building (so to speak).
Linux needs a focus, a place that creates standards. Businesses will find it too hard to deal with the chaotic nature of Linux. Maybe Peren’s with his UserLinux distro should ask the OSDL if they want to join efforts?
It they are thinking, all they would have to do is provide the harddrive space and the bandwidth, and a community would form around the OSDL.
I hope they really rethink this. The more I consider it, the more I can see the advantages of the OSDL stepping up and providing leadership and stablity.
I don’t like anyone trying to be the center of anything. I like people doing things that make them the center because they provide so many resources and effort to be a leader. But as soon as companies/organization start setting their mission to be as central to all our lives as the TV or telephone I get worried.