Linux Foundation
 | |
| Type | 501(c)(6) organization |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2007 |
| Headquarters |
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| Origins | OSDL & FSG |
| Key people |
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| Area served | Worldwide |
| Focus(es) | Linux |
| Method(s) | Promotion, protection, and standardization of Linux by providing unified resources and services needed for open source to successfully compete with closed platforms. |
| Members | 185 Corporate Members, and a multitude of Individual Members[1] |
| Website | www.linuxfoundation.org |
The Linux Foundation (LF) is a non-profit technology consortium chartered to foster the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007 by the merger of the Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and the Free Standards Group (FSG), the Linux Foundation sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and is supported by leading Linux and open source companies, including prominent technology corporations such as Fujitsu, HP,[2] IBM, Intel, NEC, Oracle, Qualcomm and Samsung,[3] and developers from around the world.
The Linux Foundation promotes,[4] protects,[5] and standardizes[6] Linux "by providing a comprehensive set of services to compete effectively with closed platforms."[7]
History
On September 11, 2011, The Linux Foundation's website was taken down due to a breach discovered 27 days prior, including but limited to all attendant subdomains of The Linux Foundation, such as Linux.com.[8] Major parts including OpenPrinting[9] were still offline on October 20, 2011. The restoration was complete on January 4, 2012 (although one site, the Linux Developer Network, will not be restored).[10]
Goals
The Linux Foundation serves as a neutral spokesperson for Linux and generates original content that advances the understanding of the Linux platform. It also fosters innovation by hosting collaboration events among the Linux technical community, application developers, industry, and end users to solve pressing issues facing Linux. Through the Linux Foundation's community programs, end users, developers, and industry members collaborate on technical, legal, and promotional issues.
In order for Linux creator Linus Torvalds and other key kernel developers to remain independent, the Linux Foundation sponsors them so they can work full-time on improving Linux. The Linux Foundation also manages the Linux trademark, offers developers legal intellectual property protection, and coordinates industry and community legal collaboration and education.
The Linux Foundation offers application developers standardization services and support that makes Linux an attractive target for their development efforts. These include: the Linux Standard Base (LSB) and the Linux Developer Network.
The Linux Foundation supports the Linux community by offering technical information and education through its annual events, such as the Linux Collaboration Summit, the Linux Kernel Developers Summit, and the general LinuxCon event inaugurated in September 2009.
The Linux Foundation also provides services to key areas of the Linux community, including an open source developer travel fund and other administrative assistance. Through its workgroups, members and developers can collaborate on key technical areas. There is also a training program that is vendor-neutral, technically advanced, and created with the actual leaders of the Linux development community.
Publications
Fields of activity
Linux.com
On March 3, 2009, the Linux Foundation announced that they would take over management of Linux.com from its previous owners, SourceForge, Inc.
The site was relaunched on May 13, 2009, shifting away from its previous incarnation as a news site to become a central source for Linux tutorials, information, software, documentation and answers across the server, desktop/netbook, mobile, and embedded areas. It also includes a directory of Linux software and hardware.
Much like Linux itself, Linux.com plans to rely on the community to create and drive the content and conversation.
Linux Videos
The Linux Foundation hosts a Linux video forum where users, developers and vendors can create and share Linux video tutorials. It also includes videos from recent Linux Foundation events, as well as other industry forums. It is the home for the annual Linux Foundation Video Contest.[11] The Linux Foundation plans to add commissioned series of Linux video tutorials on Linux.com in the months ahead.
Linux Developer Network
The Linux Developer Network is an online community for Linux application developers and independent software vendors who want to start or continue to develop applications for the Linux platform.
The Linux Developer Network's goal is to empower developers to target the Linux platform. One of the ways the Linux Developer Network helps developers accomplish this is to help them build portable Linux applications. The Linux Developer Network also gives developers tools to create the best Linux apps possible, no matter which platform developers want to work with.
Training
The Linux Foundation Training Program features instructors and content straight from the leaders of the Linux developer community.
Attendees receive Linux training that is vendor-neutral, technically advanced and created with the actual leaders of the Linux development community themselves. The Linux Foundation Linux training courses, both online and in-person, give attendees the broad, foundational knowledge and networking needed to thrive in their careers.
Linux Standard Base
The Linux Standard Base, or LSB, is a joint project by several Linux distributions under the organizational structure of the Linux Foundation to standardize the software system structure, or filesystem hierarchy, used with Linux operating system. The LSB is based on the POSIX specification, the Single UNIX Specification, and several other open standards, but extends them in certain areas.
According to the LSB:
The goal of the LSB is to develop and promote a set of open standards that will increase compatibility among Linux distributions and enable software applications to run on any compliant system even in binary form. In addition, the LSB will help coordinate efforts to recruit software vendors to port and write products for Linux Operating System.
The LSB compliance may be certified for a product by a certification procedure.[12]
The LSB specifies for example: standard libraries, a number of commands and utilities that extend the POSIX standard, the layout of the file system hierarchy, run levels, the printing system, including spoolers such as CUPS and tools like Foomatic and several extensions to the X Window System.
OpenPrinting
The OpenPrinting workgroup is a website belonging to the Linux Foundation which provides documentation and software support for printing under Linux. Formed as LinuxPrinting.org, in 2006 it became part of the Free Standards Group.
They developed a database that lists a wide variety of printers from various manufacturers. The database allows people to give a report on the support and quality of each printer, and they also give a report on the support given to Linux by each printer vendor. They have also created a foomatic (formerly cupsomatic) script which plugs into the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS).
Collaborative Projects
Linux Foundation Collaborative Projects. As of October 2013, the following "Collaborative Projects" were founded (alphabetical order)
Code Aurora Forum
Code Aurora Forum is a consortium of companies with projects serving the mobile wireless industry. Software projects it concerns itself with are e.g. Android for MSM, Femto Linux Project, LLVM, MSM WLAN and Linux-MSM.
FOSSBazaar
FOSSBazaar is an open community of technology and industry leaders who are collaborating to accelerate adoption of free and open-source software in the enterprise.
MeeGo
MeeGo was project to build a Linux kernel-based operating system for mobile devices and IVI. It was replaced by Tizen.
Open Virtualization Alliance (OVA)
The consortium was founded 2011. At the LinuxCon 2013 it was announced, that it has become a Linux Foundation Collaborative Project. Kernel-based Virtual Machine and oVirt.
bel
The Biological Expression Language (BEL) is a language for representing scientific findings in the life sciences in a computable form. OpenBEL powers SBVImprover Challenge 3. The goal of the Challenge is to perform peer review of a massive number of networks for lung biology. The key is using OpenBEL to represent the biology in a consistent open format that can be turned into a computationally tractable model
OpenDaylight
OpenDaylight is a community-led, open, industry-supported framework, for accelerating adoption, fostering new innovation, reducing risk and creating a more transparent approach to Software-Defined Networking
OpenMama
OpenMAMA (Open Middleware Agnostic Messaging API) is a lightweight vendor-neutral integration layer for systems built on top of a variety of message orientated middlewares.
Tizen
Tizen is a free and open-source, standards-based software platform supported by leading mobile operators, device manufacturers, and silicon suppliers for multiple device categories such as smartphones, tablets, netbooks, in-vehicle infotainment devices, and smart TVs.
Xen Project
The Xen Project team is a global open source community that develops the Xen Hypervisor, contributes to the Linux PVOPS framework, the Xen® Cloud Platform and Xen® ARM.
yocto Project
The Yocto Project is an open source collaboration project that provides templates, tools and methods to help you create custom Linux-based systems for embedded products regardless of the hardware architecture. It was founded in 2010 as a collaboration among many hardware manufacturers, open-source operating systems vendors, and electronics companies to bring some order to the chaos of embedded Linux development.
Members
By the end of April 2013, there are more than 180 corporate members who identify with the ideals & mission of the Linux Foundation:[13][14]
- Platinum Members (8), who each donate US$500,000 annually, incl. (listed alphabetically) Fujitsu Ltd, Hewlett-Packard Development Co. LP, Intel Corp., IBM Corp., NEC Corp., Oracle Corp., Qualcomm Innovation Center Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd
- Gold Members (14), who each donate US$100,000 annually, incl. (listed alphabetically) Advanced Micro Devices Inc., China Mobile Ltd, Cisco Systems Inc., Citrix Systems, Electronics and Telecommunications Research Inst., Google Inc., Hitachi Ltd, Huawei, Motorola Solutions Inc., NetApp Inc., NYSE Technologies, Panasonic Corp., SUSE and Toyota Motor Corp.
- Silver Members (157), who each donate US$5,000-20,000 (scaling with number of employees) annually, e.g. (listed alphabetically) Adobe Systems Inc., ARM Holdings PLC, Broadcom Corp., Canonical Ltd, Dell Inc., DreamWorks Animation LLC, EMC Corp., Igalia S.L., Inktank, Lexmark International, Inc., LG Electronics Inc., MIPS Technologies Inc., Protecode Inc., Red Hat Inc., Renesas Electronics Corp., Siemens AG, Sony Corp., Texas Instruments Inc., Tieto, Twitter, Toshiba Corp., VMware Inc., et al.
- Affiliates (6).
Funding
Its funding comes primarily from its Platinum Members: Fujitsu, HP, IBM, Intel, NEC, Oracle, Qualcomm, and Samsung and for many years Hitachi.[15] These nine each having a representative on the Board of Directors, they hold a majority on the 16-person board.[16]
References
- ↑ "Members". The Linux Foundation. 2013-06-20. Retrieved 2013-06-29.
- ↑ Bort, Julie (2012-11-05). "Hewlett-Packard Plunks Down $500,000 To Help Linux—And Maybe Send Microsoft A Signal". Business Insider. Retrieved 2013-11-13.
- ↑ Latif, Lawrence (2012-06-06). "Samsung takes a seat with Intel and IBM at the Linux Foundation". The Inquirer. Retrieved 2013-11-13.
- ↑ LF Collaboration Forum statement
- ↑ LF Linux Protection statement
- ↑ About the Linux Standard Base
- ↑ "New Linux Foundation Launches – Merger of Open Source Development Labs and Free Standards Group" (Press release). The Linux Foundation. January 22, 2007. Retrieved 2011-04-28.
- ↑ Proffitt, Brian (2011-09-11). "Linux.com, Linux Foundation Sites Breached". ITworld. Retrieved 2013-06-29.
- ↑ "Openprinting down due to hack at the linux foundation | Daniel Dressler". Danieru.com. 2011-10-13. Retrieved 2013-06-29.
- ↑ Proffitt, Brian. "Linux Foundation sites back in action". ITworld. Retrieved 5 January 2012.
- ↑
- ↑ http://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/Certification
- ↑ HP pays $500,000 for Linux Foundation Platinum membership
- ↑ LF Members, 2013-01-27
- ↑ These are the "Platnum Members", paying US$500,000 per year according to Schedule A in LF's bylaws. That's US$4 million. The Gold Members contribute a combined total of US$1.6, and smaller members less again.
- ↑ "Board Members". The Linux Foundation. 2013-06-20. Retrieved 2013-06-29.
External links
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