Blogs

The fact that the Linux kernel now has an estimated development value of $1.4 billion is an intriguing development—it certainly represents a significant milestone for the Linux kernel community. After we published the "Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution" whitepaper, out of curiosity I wondered where in the overall development history of the Linux kernel the $1 billion number was actually reached.

For those of you who haven’t heard, Barack Obama will be the first president to have a laptop on his desk at the oval office. (He does however have to give up his trusted Blackberry.)

Google CEO Eric Schmidt, in a conversation with Arianna Huffington on MSNBC, today said that he hopes Obama uses a Mac and not a PC. Excuse me Eric (and Arianna) isn’t there another option you may be missing?

In this month’s Linux Foundation newsletter:

* Linux Foundation publishes guide to participating in Linux community
* Linux valued at $10b by new Linux Foundation white paper
* Linux Foundation holds successful first End User Summit
* The flagship LSB portability tool Linux Application Checker is released
* The Linux Foundation launches Linux Developer Network beta
* CME Group, Nokia, and Canonical among many making membership moves
* Linux Fast Boot Developments

If you hail from one of the hot beds of high tech--Silicon Valley, say, or (in my case) the Route 128/495 area of Massachusetts, you've doubtless heard the phrase "serial entrepreneur." What those words describe is someone who has started several companies, and the phrase, when used, is invariably regarded as a compliment. These days, if such a serial entrepreneur has some major successes under her belt, that makes her one of the elite of the high tech nobility - someone with the golden touch, that can turn ideas into huge returns for founders and investors alike.

It is hard for the executive director of the Linux Foundation to feel bad for Microsoft, but they are having a bad week while Linux continues to move forward in innovative ways into new markets for computing. Let’s take a look at the difference between Microsoft and Linux this week:

Linus Torvalds released 2.6.28-rc1 and closed the merge window on October 23. So we can now see what will be in the 2.6.28 kernel. Once again, it looks like an active development cycle with a lot of new stuff for Linux users.

Last week, I attended the Linux Plumber's Conference, a funny-sounding but very important conference.  My wife can't get the image of Mario and Luigi out of her head, but "plumbing" in this case concerns the flow of data between core parts of the Linux system, not the flow of water.

One of the important mini-conferences held there was the Audio Conference, run by Lennart Poettering.  A good portion of the miniconf was spent discussing good end-developer APIs for sound on Linux, or (more accurately) the lack thereof.  Lennart talked about his ideas, but was intentionally vague about many of them, promising to follow up later with some documentation.

Novell is about to begin the Beta programs for SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 which is expected to be released early in 2009.  There will be a general Beta program for end customers, and there will be a separate Beta program for ISVs to help them get their applications ready for when SUSE Linux Enteprise Server and SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 11 ships.  We are planning on following the Linux Standard Base Version 4.0 (which is in development now) with the release of SLE 11

With the price drop, I finally decided to get a 32GB iPod Touch, and I have to admit, Apple has done a really nice job. Its decisions about which applications it decides to arbitrarily blacklist from its AppStore (either now or without warning in the future) is evil, of course, but I don’t plan to develop on a locked-in platform such iPod/iPhone, so that’s not a problem.