Linux is the world’s largest collaborative software development project. People from all over the world have influenced the Linux kernel code, and it runs on everything from mainframe computers to wristwatches. Linux, and free software development in general, provides some tremendous insights into what makes a successful project. Can today’s startups learn anything from the history of Linux?

The history of Linux proves that collaborative development speeds true innovation. If Linus Torvalds were left to work on Linux alone, there’s no way it would be the success it is today. A great many of the things that Linux does today are a direct result of people scratching their own itches, and then contributing their work back upstream to Linus. Many people focusing on their own little (and not-so-little) problems have made Linux the powerhouse that it is today.

It might not make sense for every startup to develop their project in public, but they can certainly avoid reinventing many wheels by using existing free software projects wherever possible. Many smart people are working all day every day to improve the building blocks of
innovation, and startups should be a part of that communal effort.

Certainly startups should focus on their own “secret sauce”, but they can also participate in the larger free software ecosystem. For example, there’s no long-term competitive advantage to a startup if they make improvements to Apache, or MongoDB, or other “plumbing” aspects of the Linux stack. Any such improvements can — and, in my opinion, should! — be shared upstream to benefit everyone.

In a similar vein, though, if there’s some home-grown technology that helps your startup but isn’t fundamental to its success, why not release it in order to leverage the global body of free software developers? Facebook releases free software. LinkedIn releases free software. Google releases free software. All of these releases are obviously used internally, but they’re not fundamental to the success of the company. I think there’s a lot to learn from the big players in this respect.

As Ubuntu‘s Technical Architect Allison Randal said, “Free Software is a fundamentally superior model for developing software.” Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation‘s Executive Director, says, “Free your technology and see it spread and do things you never even imagined were possible.”

Another lesson that startups can learn from Linux: when you disrupt the status quo you attract enemies. When Linux was gaining traction through the 90s, it was the target of intense attack from established industry players. Many of those early detractors are now contributing to the Linux kernel, as well as many other free software projects.

Zemlin points to Facebook as a shining example of what “the Linux community has been practicing for years: first – don’t do it for the money, second maintain the hacker way. And, the money follows.” He goes on to observe that there “is no coincidence that one of the greatest entrepreneurial success stories of the last decade is deeply rooted in one of the greatest technology innovations of the last two decades: Linux and open development.”

Every time I write about Ubuntu and its (not-so) new Unity interface, I see lots and lots of comments decrying it as useless, an abomination, the worst thing to ever happen to computers, etc. Personally, I’m not so flummoxed by it, but there’s no denying that Unity has been a divisive addition to Canonical’s flagship Linux distribution. The choice to move application menus up to the global bar at the top of the screen has been frustrating to many, and a lot of power users find Unity too mouse-intensive. Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s Self-Appointed Benevolent Dictator For Life, yesterday unveiled the next step in the Unity evolution: the Head-Up Display.

According to Shuttleworth, their testing revealed that “users spent a lot of time, relatively speaking, navigating the menus of their applications, either to learn about the capabilities of the app, or to take a specific action.” The goal of the new Head-Up display is to — eventually — replace menus altogether. Instead of clicking through menus, users type the command they require in a search box. It may sound a bit counter-intuitive at first blush, but take a look at this video for a few examples:

Certainly typing “undo” is not a particularly good example of efficiency, but it’s important to remember that not everyone can commit “CTRL+Z” to memory. If you know what you want to do, typing it into an assisted search box may well be faster than navigating nested menus or memorizing arcance key combinations. As Shuttleworth notes, “Hotkeys are a sort of mental gymnastics, the HUD is a continuation of mental flow.” And for power users who railed against the importance of the mouse in Unity to date, the HUD should be a welcome first step toward a better all-keyboard experience.

Shuttleworth also mentions that the long-term goals of the HUD include full voice integration, allowing you to simply say the word “undo” rather than type it.

Before you start casting aspersions, do read Shuttleworth’s blog post about the HUD. It’s worth a couple minutes of your time.

The Linux Foundation is sharing the results of their latest invitation-only survey of enterprise Linux users. Their last such survey, in August 2010, revealed Linux was gaining popularity in enterprise computing. It should come as no real surprise that the latest survey shows more of the same.

A lot has happened since late 2010, and the Linux Foundation survey reflects that. In “Linux Adoption Trends 2012: A Survey of Enterprise End Users” we find that a substantial number of enterprise users “expressed concern with the rapid growth of data, and Linux is clearly the platform of choice to address it.” Less than half of respondents are planning to use Windows to handle their “Big Data” requirements.

While nearly 80% of respondents expect an increase in the number of Linux deployments in their organizations over the next five years, only 21.7% of those surveyed expect an increase in the number of Windows servers during the same time frame.

Perceived technical barriers to enterprise Linux adoption have dropped significantly, too. Only 12.2% of respondents cited technical issues as an impediment to success, down from 20.3% from the last survey. That says a lot about the overall value proposition for Linux installations.

It’s worth remembering, though, that this was an invitation-only survey. I’m sure a similar survey from Microsoft would yield results more pleasing to Redmond. Nonetheless, Linux is clearly at the vanguard of technical innovation, both for the traditional enterprise data center as well as for nascent cloud computing solutions.

CES is upon us, and is no doubt chock full of the usual suspects of consumer electronics OEMs, ODMs, and more. One interesting new attendee this year is Canonical, the folks behind the Ubuntu GNU/Linux distribution. Canonical is making a big push to get Ubuntu onto more than just desktops and laptops, and have been busy building relationships with CE companies to get it onto tablets, phones, and automobile in-vehicle infotainment displays. We’ll see Ubuntu make appearances at several booths to demo this work. Canonical will also be announcing Ubuntu TV.

Tablets, phones, IVI systems and Ubuntu TV are a far cry from Ubuntu’s humble beginnings as an easy to use Linux desktop. “Linux for human beings” has always been Ubuntu’s tagline, not “Linux for human being’s portable electronic devices.” So one might be forgiven for asking “WTF, Canonical?” I posed a slightly more polite version of that question to Jane Silber, CEO of Canonical.

According to her, CES 2012 will be the first glimpse of an expansion of Ubuntu’s reach across a spectrum of consumer devices. Canonical has a broad multi-screen strategy, and much of their work on the Unity interface to date has been laying the foundation for that strategy. Moreover, the work on Unity is just one example of Canonical’s efforts to move beyond being simply an integrator of components for a functional desktop Linux experience. Their Software Center is another example, as an effort to reward application devlopers. They’ve been working with OEMs to assist in product development. There’s also UbuntuOne, their cloud storage and synchronization service. And Canonical has been working hard to develop touch interface support in the Linux world, as well as driving better ARM support.

Ubuntu TV is to be the first proof point of this new strategy. Silber says that you’ll be able to watch your own media files, streaming media, or broadcast media. The goal is to combine all of these media sources without radically changing user behavior. Specifically, Ubuntu TV is not simply a Linux desktop on your TV. Canonical, says Silber, does not believe in the “browser on your TV” experience. “Browsers belong on secondary devices — tablets, phones, etc,” Silber told me.

Playing on the Ubuntu tagline, Silber claims Ubuntu TV is “TV for human beings. It just works.” As you can see from the images, Ubuntu TV will have a similar interface to the current Ubuntu desktop, with the launcher on the side, but there will be fundamental differences. The goal is to make Ubuntu TV the “OS for your television”, and not necessarily a set-top box. In that regard, Canonical is working with hardware partners to execute Ubuntu TV. It should be clear at this point that while Canonical has made great strides with it, Ubuntu TV it is not, yet, a finished product. They’ll be demoing working code at CES, but we shouldn’t expect working hardware for a little while yet.

I pointed out to Silber that there is a large, vocal body of people who despise the Unity interface, and asked whether it was really a good idea to extend that for media consumption purposes. Silber, like most poeple at Canonical, remained firm that their user testing bore out the merits of Unity. “Judge us by our actions, but also by our results,” she said. As you might recall, the first version of Ubuntu to ship Unity was also the fastest adopted version of Ubuntu.

Ubuntu TV will be open source, and we should expect an application development framework from Canonical. I asked Silber about Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), and how Canonical was working with content producers and distributors. I specifically wanted to know whether Canonical was drawing any lines in the sand with respect to the kinds of content that would be playable on Ubuntu TV. She said that they’re making an effort to reduce the proliferation of DRM, but they recognize that they’re late to this party and have a lot of work ahead of them. Silber acknowledged that Canonical is involved with UltraViolet, stating that “it helps simplify things from our perspective” with respect to encodings and DRM.

According to Silber, the biggest hurdle for Ubuntu TV is breaking down all the walled gardens that content producers and rightsholders have erected. Every studio wants you to watch their content on their website, with their widgets, and their advertising — all under their control. Canonical believes that there should be a single, elegant interface for consuming media, regardless of the content source. Silber believes that Canonical and Ubuntu represent a reasonable middle ground as a relatively vendor-neutral solution to this problem. Canonical isn’t in the media production business, nor are they in the hardware manufacturing business: they just want to be the OS for your TV (for now).

That notion of “reasonable middle ground” extends beyond just Ubuntu TV. As Canonical pushes to get Ubuntu onto more devices, Silber says that many CE manufacturers are looking for a third option to the iOS / Android hegemony. Again Silber admits that Canonical is late to this game, but this does allow them to learn from the mistakes of the trailblazers, as well as to identify under-served markets. Device manufacturers want a platform for innovation that supports post-sale service revenues in ways that Apple and Google aren’t satisfying. They’re also increasingly aware that upgrades are fundamentally important to the successful longevity of their products. Canonical, according to Silber, is a smaller, easier to work with partner that has a proven rhythm for releasing major updates.

While Ubuntu TV is still a developing product, it’s a positive sign of things to come from Canonical. Silber assured me that we should expect additional news throughout the year that demonstrates the viability of Ubuntu as a platform across multiple consumer devices. With UbuntuOne as a data synchronization service to connect Ubuntu-powered devices, I think we can expect interesting things in the way of converged user experiences from Canonical in 2012.

Today Red Hat announces the availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.2, the latest iteration of their flagship Linux distribution. I don’t usually cover every point release of every Linux distribution, but since I’ve covered recent releases from Canonical and SUSE I thought I’d give Red Hat some coverage, too.

RHEL 6.2 is in some ways a remarkable release, and in other ways completely uninteresting. It’s uninteresting in that there are no real surprises: this is a regularly scheduled update to the RHEL 6 product line, and it was released right on time. Red Hat customers have driven most of what’s included in this release, in the form of bug reports and feature requests.

RHEL 6.2 is uninteresting, too, because Red Hat’s promise to their enterprise customers is API and ABI compatibility for the life of the product. But this is also a reason why this release is so interesting.

Maintaining API and ABI compatibility on a complex suite of inter-related free software projects is no small task even on a short term basis. To manage it over a couple of years requires careful planning, attention to detail, and impressive staff talent. After all, companies are using Red Hat Enterprise Linux with the expectation that their servers will work exactly the same way for nearly a decade.

But the technology driving Linux development doesn’t stay the same for that same period of time. In addition to continuous kernel improvements, there’s whole swathes of new technologies rapidly evolving — KVM and Xen virtualization, filesystem advancements, and more — as well as the regular feature updates to the ecosystem of free software that go into a modern distribution: web servers, programming languages, support libraries, and more. Red Hat’s customers want to use these whiz-bang new features, but still enjoy long-term support offerings. It’s a delicate balancing act, and in that regard the release of RHEL 6.2 is utterly fascinating.

According to Tim Burke, VP of Linux Engineering at Red Hat, more changes (updates, bug fixes, etc) went into RHEL 6.2 than the entirety of what went into Red Hat Enterprise Linux version 4, which was released in February, 2005. The list of RHEL 6.2 enhancements (PDF) is impressive, and includes a host of physical and virtual guest performance enhancements, improved management controls, and more. Also included are a variety technology previews of essentially beta software that people want to play with and that Red Hat wants to evaluate, like Parallel NFS and Linux containers.

“Red Hat is the leading innovator in Linux development,” claimed Burke. Certainly Red Hat is doing something right, as they’ve enjoyed 38 sequential quarters of successful growth all the while making predictable, sustainable releases for their customers.

openSUSE, the community developed Linux distribution sponsored by SUSE, has released version 12.1 today. At first glance, openSUSE 12.1 is pretty much in line with recent releases from Fedora and Ubuntu: GNOME 3.2, systemd, etc. But a closer look starts to reveal some real divergence between the various Linux offerings today. For example, while Fedora 16 allows you to choose btrfs for your filesystem, openSUSE 12.1 uses btrfs by default. There’s a number of other interesting advancements packed in this release, too.

The filesystem features provided by btrfs are enhanced on openSUSE 12.1 with Snapper, a user-space utility to take, compare, and revert snapshots of files. This has huge potential to make life better for users. It certainly won’t eliminate the need for backups, but it’s a strong step in the right direction. Similarly, openSUSE 12.1 includes support for ownCloud, “slim yet powerful private cloud software”. Again, this isn’t going to eliminate Dropbox or similar services, but it’s a step in the right direction toward self-sufficiency for regular end users in the Free Software space.

For power users looking to stay current with the state of the art in Free Software, openSUSE 12.1 includes Tumbleweed, a rolling update of tested, stable software. This replaces the rigid periodic release of a complete, complex system. Instead of upgrading all the software in your entire system every six or twelve months, Tumbleweed will upgrade individual components as new stable releases are made available.

As Zonker opined on G+, there’s a lot to differentiate one Linux distribution from another right now. It used to mostly be Red Hat-like versus Debian-like, but now each distribution has its own stable of compelling features.

Red Hat’s OpenShift platform as a service offering has been in public beta for a while now. It offers a fairly simple way for people to jumpstart “cloud” development efforts by abstracting out all the messy business of setting up application and database servers. Instead, you simply publish your source code to OpenShift, and their platform does the rest. Supported languages are those used heavily by nimble, agile startup types: PHP, Python, Ruby. Interestingly, OpenShift also supports Java. That’s not a language that many people associate with cloud solutions. Today, Red Hat is announcing that they’re improving their support of Java on OpenShift with support for “full Java lifecycle for developers”.

I spoke with Issac Roth, Red Hat’s PaaS Master (a groovy title, if ever there was one) and Jason Anderson, from Red Hat’s middleware team, about the announcement. According to Roth, OpenShift has always aimed to support those technologies used by open source developers — usually the “P” in the LAMP stack, as well as Ruby. But Red Hat also wants to support enterprise developers, and wants to help enterprise developers get working on cloud solutions using their preferred language. They’re doing that in a couple of ways, with today’s announcement.

First, OpenShift is getting integration into JBoss Tools, their Eclipse-based Java development environment, “allowing developers to easily push their code to the cloud from the leading Java IDE. Future integration is also planned for JBoss Developer Studio.” I asked Roth about OpenShift integration with other IDEs, and he assured me that work was underway. Indeed, Cloud IDE should work with OpenShift right now.

The ability to push an app to a platform from your IDE isn’t the only new feature being announced. Red Hat is also working to minimize the pain of building Java apps. OpenShift is adding support for Maven to help streamline the dependency resolution process, and Jenkins to provide “build as a service” functionality.

According to Roth, this is a push to allow Java developers to do everything “in the cloud”: code, build, and scale. Java app developers can focus on their apps, and not worry about the infrastructure. The addition of Maven allows developers to get away from manually wrangling library dependency installations for their apps, and in some cases may avoid the use of Ant scripts altogether. Jenkins support helps developers iterate quickly, and the existing OpenShift platform handles scalability.

When I think of Java apps, I usually think of monolithic corporate apps that communicate with corporate databases and directory services. I don’t think of cloud apps. So I asked Roth and Anderson who was driving this push at OpenShift. Specifically, what customers were saying to Red Hat “Gosh, I wish we could build our Java apps in the cloud!” They declined to discuss customer specifics, but did share that Red Hat is eating its own dogfood by deploying several content portals and mobile app backends with Java on OpenShift.

It’s not entirely surprising that Red Hat is driving Java in the cloud. After all, they own JBoss, one of the major Java middleware offerings in use today. While OpenShift’s Java support is currently limited to JBoss AS, the community-driven version (like Fedora is to Red Hat Enterprise Linux), we can probably expect to see JBoss EAP support in the not-too-distant future. Moreover, there are few PaaS offerings on the market today, save maybe for Microsoft Azure. Most folks seem to be focusing on infrastructure as a service, so the move toward PaaS opens up some interesting new opportunities.

OpenShift is currently free to use, with some modest limits on application size and scalability. If you’re a developer, why not take it for a spin?

The Ubuntu Developer Summit, starting today in Florida, is a gathering of Canonical employees, industry partners and Ubuntu community members to “define the focus and plans for [the] up-coming version of Ubuntu”. That version, 12.04 codenamed “Precise Pangolin”, will be released in April of 2012 and will be the next Long Term Support (LTS) release of the distribution. The changes scheduled for 12.04 are interesting, and simultaneously represent the current state of the art of the Ubuntu distribution as well as represent the foundation on which future developments will be built. I spoke with Mark Shuttleworth, Ubuntu’s Benevolent Dictator For Life, about what to expect in Ubuntu 12.04 and beyond.

First and foremost, Shuttleworth pointed out that the support schedule for 12.04 has been extended from three to five years on the desktop. Ubuntu LTS releases have historically provided three years of support on the desktop (five on the server), with new LTS versions coming out every two years. With 12.04, desktop users will enjoy support through 2017, which is a pretty long time to offer support for a desktop operating system.

I asked Shuttleworth what the motivation was for extending the 12.04 support offering on the desktop and he immediately responded “corporate deployments.” There are a number of companies standardizing on Ubuntu for their desktop computing needs, and the three year support from prior LTS releases was proving inadequate. Large corporations don’t adopt the latest and greatest technologies quickly, and they often have long QA processes to ensure that new desktop operating systems will properly function with their fleet of legacy applications. (Just look at how many companies are still in the transition process from Windows XP to Windows 7!)

Shuttleworth pointed out that there’s a growing change in attitude toward corporate computing. As more and more applications move “to the cloud”, IT departments are seeing that there’s less and less need for expensive desktop lock-in. Something like Ubuntu provides sufficient computing resources for a great many environments, and is free from licensing fees.

Ubuntu 12.04 will be the conclusion of the current two year LTS cycle, which will include four total releases: Maverick Meerkat (10.10), Natty Narwhal (11.04), Oneiric Ocelot (11.10). After the release of Precise Panglon, Shuttleworth and Canonical plan to get cracking on 14.04, the next LTS version (not yet codenamed). The work building up to 14.04 will, according to Shuttleworth, challenge the Ubuntu community and Canonical’s partners to exceed the status quo.

In the meantime, the conversations at the Ubuntu Developer Summit this week will be the beginning of public conversations around the notion of “Ubuntu on devices”. There’s already been a lot of internal conversation on this subject, and some engagement with industry partners (witness the recently launched Ubuntu webbook in South Africa), but UDS will really open these conversations up for community participation.

Shuttleworth reminded me that the Ubuntu tagline has always been “Linux for human beings.” He went on to note, though, that human beings computing — and will continue to compute — using a lot more than the legacy PC. Webbooks are just one small subset of devices on which Shuttleworth has his eye. There’s also phones, tablets, and “smart screens” — intelligent devices with limited input mechanisms like televisions, in-dash automotive displays, and more.

Unity, the user interface rolled out in Ubuntu 10.10 Netbook Edition and officially adopted as the default desktop interface in Ubuntu 11.04, lays the foundation for future development of Ubuntu on devices. One of the major thrusts of Unity was to embrace alternate computing form factors while still presenting a reasonably consistent user interface. Unity was refined in Ubuntu 11.10, and will continue to be refined in 12.04 and beyond. The lens framework will grow, and presumably third-party lens contributions will make the Unity experience smoother for all Ubuntu users.

It’s almost impossible to talk about Unity without hearing some vocal body of people complain about it. As a long-time Ubuntu user, I admit I found the transition a little challenging and I still experience some frustrations with it today. I asked Shuttleworth about this, specifically looking to learn what Canonical might know about user feedback that doesn’t get heavy publicity.

Shuttleworth was obviously prepared for this kind of question because he started his response by saying “We don’t know exactly how many people are using Ubuntu, but we have a pretty good estimate based on download numbers and watching browser user agent strings. I can tell you that Ubuntu 11.04, the first to offer Unity, was the fastest adopted version of Ubuntu to date.” Whether this was simply a natural growth in the Ubuntu user base, or people being curious about the new interface, is hard to tell.

Shuttleworth went on to describe the user testing that Canonical performs on each version of Ubuntu. They do real-world performance testing using randomly selected focus groups: people who may or may not be comfortable doing any number of computing tasks. Canonical asks these folks to perform a variety of real-world things (get photos off a digital camera and posted to Facebook, for example) and watches their performance. With each successive iteration of Ubuntu, they’re able to document how much easier these tasks are (or are not) and adjust their development priorities accordingly.

All key design issues are evaluated in the context of these tests. According to Shuttleworth, “people get much more done, from scratch, when presented with 11.10 versus 11.04 or any prior release of Ubuntu.” The obvious goal is to continue that trend into 12.04 and beyond.

“Ease of use is not incompatible with power users,” he went on, noting that some of the most vocal complaints against Unity come from the most technical of users: people who consider “computing” to be having a dozen terminal windows open across multiple virtual desktops. Shuttleworth acknowledged that Unity in its current form might not be ideal for those kinds of users, but noted that it’s not impossible to reconcile the two. As an example, he pointed out that a great many Linux developers are today using Macs running OSX. Clearly OSX has staked its livelihood on “ease of use”, and has been remarkably successful. And yet power users are using it more and more. Shuttleworth is sure that the Linux desktop can strike a similar balance. Expect to hear more about this from UDS this week.

One of the big features introduced in 11.10 was the Ubuntu Software Center. Of particular interest with this is the proliferation of proprietary, closed source software. I asked Shuttleworth about this. “We celebrate freedom!” was his immediate response. Users are free to get stuff done, and free to get it done using the software they want to run. According to Shuttleworth, it is not Canonical’s place to enforce their software morality onto their users. Sure, they’d love to see everyone being successful with exclusively free software, but on the whole they’re pragmatic enough to know that their users may want — indeed, demand — something else. According to Shuttleworth this stance is the result of many heated discussions inside Canonical, and not everyone is happy with it. Nonetheless, Shuttleworth is very proud of the fact that many commercial developers are working to run their software atop Ubuntu, and Canonical wants to support them as much as possible, with the Software Center and the developer.ubuntu.com portal.

After talking about desktops for a bit, I shifted the conversation to servers, virtualization and cloud computing. I noted that Ubuntu and Canonical don’t seem to be as aggressively pursuing virtualization as Red Hat, who is making a big push with their Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization product and the oVirt project. Shuttleworth pointed out that Ubuntu was the first major distribution to make KVM a core part of their distribution. With that said, however, he acknowledged that they’re largely favoring cloud over virtualization.

Shuttleworth observed that Ubuntu is the most popular guest OS across all public cloud environments. Canonical wants to extend that to be the most popular base OS for cloud servers as well. HP’s recent decision to use Ubuntu as their preferred host distribution is one small step toward that goal.

He identifies Amazon Web Services as the de facto standard for cloud solutions: anyone looking to deploy a cloud offering today must be API compatible with Amazon. AWS controls much of the conversation simply by enjoying “first mover” status. Despite much effort by other proprietary companies like Oracle and VMware, Shuttleworth doesn’t think any of these others have any chance of significantly influencing the cloud conversation.

Canonical is pushing “cloud by default” by providing all the necessary features to run a cloud infrastructure with their core server offering. Canonical has thrown their weight behind OpenStack, which Shuttleworth identifies as the clear leader in open source cloud solutions. OpenStack was distributed as a component of Ubuntu 11.10 and according to Shuttleworth you should be able to deploy an N-node cloud in 15 minutes using just the core Ubuntu Server download.

Cloud is just a flattening of infrastructure, says Shuttleworth: “it’s just compute, storage, network and credentials.” In his mind, “building 50 servers is pretty much the same as building a 50-node cloud.” That is to say, it’s not really hard — or all that time consuming — today to provision 50 physical servers. Rolling out a cloud infrastructure should be as easy. He expects to see this made even easier with Ubuntu 12.04.

This raises some questions, though, as to how Canonical will reconcile the rapid advancements in cloud technologies with the five year support cycle of Ubuntu 12.04. LTS versions of Ubuntu get support for the software distributed with it, but don’t usually get new feature additions. As cloud technologies advance, 12.04 users may be left behind. Shuttleworth observed two possible solutions. The first is that folks interested in more closely tracking cloud (or other technology) advances could easily switch to the non-LTS versions of Ubuntu, updated every six months. Another possible solution would be to make available accelerated cloud feature additions to 12.04 users via an optional software repository. There’s some precedent for this within Ubuntu for other fast-moving infrastructure components, so this might well be something to expect with Ubuntu 12.04.

Ubuntu has been a remarkably successful Linux distribution. It started out exclusively as an easy-to-use desktop distribution, but has since added advanced server functionality, pioneering cloud computing integration, and sponsored an awful lot of terrific open source software development. This week’s UDS will likely produce some interesting developments.

Mark Shuttleworth, as Benevolent Dictator For Life of Ubuntu, told me “change is a fact of life, usually for the better.” Keep an eye on Canonical and the Ubuntu community to see how they aim to make Ubuntu better.

There’s been some hubbub lately about Secure Boot, a hardware-verified, malware-free operating system bootstrap process that aims to improve the overall security of computers. Part of the UEFI specification which is slated to replace the aging BIOS with which many of us are familiar, Secure Boot can forbid the loading and execution of unsigned operating systems. Microsoft is requiring that Secure Boot be activated and enforced for any OEM systems that want to use the “Designed for Windows 8″ logo. The nature of the technology, and Microsoft’s recommended implementation of it, could remove control of the overall system from the end user, and in this configuration Secure Boot may prevent Free Software operating systems from loading.

After some initial hysteria on Slashdot (where else?), calmer minds have prevailed, and have reviewed the UEFI Secure Boot specification in some detail. It’s a pretty marked change from the old BIOS: the use of public key cryptography makes the whole thing considerably more complex. But there’s nothing about Secure Boot, prima facie, that specifically locks out Free Software operating systems.

The Linux Foundation has released a paper titled “Making UEFI Secure Boot Work With Open Platforms” written by Technical Advisory Board members James Bottomley, CTO, Server Virtualization at Parallels and Jonathan Corbet, Editor at LWN.net. Concurrently, Bottomley has collaborated with Canonical’s Technical Architect, Jeremy Kerr, and Red Hat’s Senior Software Engineer, Matthew Garret, to develop another paper titled “UEFI Secure Boot Impact on Linux“.

The former document is a pretty high level analysis of the situation (only four pages), with some overall recommendations on how OEMs can ship hardware that will work with both proprietary and Free Software operating systems. The latter document is a little more technical (eight pages!), with some slightly more specific recommendations for OEMs.

The whole thing can be a little confusing if you’re not already familiar with some of the basics of public key cryptography. Platform Keys, Key Exchange Keys, signature databases. Is this all more trouble than it’s worth? I fired off a few questions to the Linux Foundation for clarification, and James Bottomley responded.

TechCrunch: First and foremost, what’s the real-world effect to end users? If SecureBoot is as complicated at the document makes me feel it is, won’t many people just decide to leave their systems in “Setup” mode and avoid the whole thing?

James Bottomley: Leaving the system in setup mode is equivalent to the current state (no secure boot). However, we know from the microsoft blog that Users who accept the Windows 8 preinstallation won’t be given the option and their systems will be locked down. The idea for users who wish to install open source is that they will be given the option of moving to the more secure user mode or remaining where they are. The point of shipping in setup mode is that handling the complexity of this choice becomes the job of the operating system install or ignition system, which we believe to be the best place for this. We anticipate that the problems potentially caused by first ship of secure boot will be resolved over time and the benefits of booting securely will outweigh the initial teething troubles.

TC: Propping up a full public key infrastructure is a great idea, but well beyond the technical prowess of many hardware manufacturers. It’s not their core competency, so who is to say they’ll do it right?

JB: It wouldn’t be done by the Hardware Manufacturers, and indeed given the security implications, it should be outsourced to an entity for whom it is a core competency. The current effect of the Microsoft Windows 8 logo proposals is that the OEMs are required to manage a list of key exchange keys, which is also not their core competency, so offloading key management to an entity whose core business it is should make the whole process less error prone.

TC: We know that Certificate Authorities are not beyond compromise, as the DigitNotar business has recently pointed out. If a security-lax hardware manufacturer gets compromised, what’s the result to end users?

JB: So this is a problem. The UEFI system contains a mechanism for revoking certificates (which is the same mechanism used in the internet to remedy the DigiNotar intrusion). However, a system which relied on a revoked key in the path of trust would refuse to boot and would either have to be switched out of secure mode or have its UFI updated to remedy the situation. However, such a compromise isn’t really any more likely (and is possibly less likely since it would be a core business interest of the CA) than an OEM key being compromised, so the problem is the same or less troublesome than the situation where there’s no CA.

The promise of “initial teething troubles” doesn’t sound particularly fun, but as with any new technology adoption it’s largely unavoidable. I do look forward to seeing Secure Boot prove successful.

The Linux Foundation is rocking out in Prague this week and they’ve got some interesting news to share. In addition to adding five new European members and the one year anniversary of the Foundation’s Yocto Project, they’re announcing their “Long Term Support Initiative” to foster a stable kernel release suitable for use in consumer electronic devices. It aims to provide “both an annual release of a Linux kernel suitable for supporting the lifespan of consumer electronics products and regular updates of those releases for two years.” The list of companies involved in the LTSI is a list of household CE names: Hitachi, LG Electronics, NEC, Panasonic, Samsung Electronics, Sony, Toshiba.

From the press release:

This new initiative is crucial because device makers are doing significant backporting, bug testing and driver development on their own, which carries substantial cost in terms of time-to-market, as well as development and engineering effort to maintain those custom kernels. Through collaboration in this initiative, these CE vendors will reduce the duplication of effort currently prevalent in the consumer electronics industry.

This is a terrific example of the power of open source software development. Stop screwing around maintaining your own custom kernel tree and driver set because that stuff doesn’t really provide you much competitive advantage in the market. Instead, collaborate with others on the “plumbing” so that everyone gets the best kernel available, and differentiate your product offering with a better user experience, or features unique to your product.

The goal is to reduce the number of private trees currently in use in the CE industry and encourage more collaboration and sharing of development resources.

The Linux Foundation has been extremely aggressive lately in shepherding this kind of collaborative development. The Yocto Project is another good example of this, as is the recently announced Linux Automotive Summit. The inexorable march of Linux into more of our every day devices in an interesting thing to watch, and I’m eager to see the Long Term Support Initiative bear fruit.

The Linux Foundation announced today the first ever Automotive Linux Summit. Taking place in Japan on November 28, 2011, it will be an opportunity to address the growing need for carmakers and Linux developers to collaborate on the future of cars as devices. Nissan and Toyota will both be there, along with Intel, NEC, and a host of other mobile solutions developers.

Dig it: “cars as devices”. The Internet of Things will be upon us sooner than we imagined. Automobiles are becoming increasingly complicated, with computers and computer systems getting more and more integrated into the whole of the vehicle, not to mention connectivity being expected by the driver at the dashboard. No single vendor can provide the breadth of experience required to develop and maintain the kind of software necessary to power all the computing on a car, so the vendor-neutral approach of the Linux stack makes tremendous sense to car makers.

The Automotive Linux Summit is specifically designed for the automotive industry and the growing cross-industry ecosystem for the future of mobility solutions. This premier vendor-neutral business and technical conference will bring together the brightest minds from the automotive industry, the Linux developer community and the mobility ecosystem. Attendees can expect to learn about how to use Linux and open source software in automotive applications ranging from in-vehicle on-board systems to cloud solutions for vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure communications.

The Automotive Linux Summit currently has an open call for participation, so if you’re into Linux on cars, or cars as devices, consider submitting a presentation proposal.

The Ubuntu Linux distribution has come a long way since it’s first release in 2004. It started out as a nicely packaged Linux desktop, built from a specific set of packages cultivated from the nearly thirty thousand packages available in the Debian distribution. Regular six-month releases ensured that Ubuntu would always be close to the cutting edge of Linux and free software development. Every fourth release is a long-term support offering, which gets security and support updates for three years. In the last seven years Canonical, the primary commercial sponsor of Ubuntu, has added a server version of Ubuntu, built UbuntuOne, a cross-platform cloud storage solution, and made great strides in cloud computing.

Hewlett Packard has recently announced that they’ve selected Ubuntu to power the HP Public Cloud; and the Indian Supreme Court has recently switched to Ubuntu from Red Hat Enterprise Linux; but the bread and butter of Ubuntu development remains their desktop offering. Version 11.10, codenamed Oneiric Ocelot and officially available on Thursday, October 13, is the latest release from Canonical and packs a number of interesting iterations of their work.

Oneiric Ocelot brings the Ubuntu Software Center forward as a first class citizen in the Ubuntu world. The look and feel of the Software Center has been updated to make it consistent with the overall Ubuntu aesthetic. Also updated is the number and variety of applications available, including commercial applications.

Canonical has been working hard to make publishing houses aware of the Software Center, and they’ve attracted some nice titles. They’re working to build an even more impressive selection of titles, and to make it as easy as possible for users to find the apps they want.

Concurrently, Canonical is courting application developers through their developer.ubuntu.com portal, which explains how to build and submit an application to the Software Center. Canonical reports a 5x increase in application submissions in the three weeks since the developer portal was announced. According to Gerry Carr, Director of Communications at Canonical, they’re now approving at least one app per day.

The motivation behind the developer platform, and the updated Software Center, is to improve the quality of apps available to users. There’s also work to monetize apps to the benefit of the developers through Ubuntu Pay. It remains to be seen just how willing Linux users will be to pay for apps, given the long history of “free as in beer” software. While only a single data point, I think the Humble Bundle offers some valuable insight, and I’d wager that there’s money to be made in the Software Center: the average price spent by Linux users for the Humble Bundle offerings always exceeds that of Windows or Mac users. The current Humble Bundle sees Linux users paying twice as much as the average Windows user.

The last release of Ubuntu, version 11.04, featured the addition of Unity, which was an effort to revitalize desktop Linux for modern hardware while simultaneously development meaningful experiences for touch-based interfaces. It was met with some hostility, as its a marked change from the desktop paradigms to which many users have grown accustomed. Ubuntu 11.10 features some refinements to the overall experience, but it’s clear that Unity is here to stay.

I asked Gerry Carr about the substantial shift in paradigm from the traditional GNOME desktop to Unity’s Dash. Carr agreed that it can be a jarring transition, because it breaks with many of the metaphors we’ve grown up using for what feels like forever, but the ways in which we use computers is changing and the interfaces need to adapt. More and more of our use of computers is to access Internet resources, so the interface should facilitate that in ways that make sense. You should be able to access more than just what’s on your system.

Carr pointed out that the lens mechanism supports heterogenous storage, which means you can keep your data where it makes sense to keep it, but still access it through a consistent, easy-to-use interface. “The Ubuntu experience is as much a rich local experience as it is a cloud experience,” said Carr.

An example of this kind of integration is the Dash itself. When searching for applications, the various lenses will find your currently installed apps as well as suggest apps available for installation. This completely sidesteps the old model of stopping what you’re doing, opening something like the Software Center, searching for an app, and finally installing it. By integrating app search directly into the Dash, Ubuntu provides a single interface to reduce the friction a user experiences.

To be fair, this is still an evolving solution. For people set in their ways, the transition to the Unity experience can be frustrating. I think one of Canonical’s big shortcomings thus far has been a real education effort to explain the value of the lens metaphor, and to help people realize the utility of it.

That complaint aside, Canonical has been working to make lenses that make the Ubuntu experience better. There’s a new Music lens that allows users to search for music. The music lens will search the user’s local music files, as well as query the Ubuntu Music Store, allowing a user to quickly identify which albums might be missing from their local collection and to buy that music quickly and easily. This is a pretty nice convergence of the local+Internet search capabilities of the lens system.

All searches — whether for apps, or files, or media, or whatever — support rich context appropriate filtering. When searching for files, you can filter by file type, size, or last modified date. When searching for media, you can filter by decade or genre. Searching for apps allows you to filter by category or rating. None of this is particularly revolutionary, but the ease with which Ubuntu 11.10 integrates the search and filter functions to the lenses is quite impressive.

Lenses don’t have to come from Canonical, either: there’s a rich API for developing your own lenses. A great example of this is the Ask Ubuntu lens. This integrates a search for the StackExchange-powered AskUbuntu.com site right into your desktop, allowing you to search for answers to problems you might be experiencing. You don’t need to open a browser and navigate to a site: you simply
search using the Unity interface in the same way that you search for new apps to install or new music to listen to.

Another neat addition to Ubuntu 11.10 is Deja Dup, a backup application that works like Apple’s Time Machine. Backups can be stored on your computer’s hard drive, an external hard drive, or to your UbuntuOne account. Storing your backups to your UbuntuOne account allows you to restore your system to different hardware, which is a neat feature. It’s also worth noting that Deja Dup is not a Canonical project: the Deja Dup folks built atop the UbuntuOne API to make this work seamlessly for Ubuntu users.

For anyone that’s used Ubuntu in the past, you may be pleased to learn that 11.10 ditches Evolution in favor of Mozilla Thunderbird as the default mail client. When I asked Carr about the motivation for this shift he immediately responded “user demand”. Clearly users are dissatisfied with Evolution. Carr also noted that more developer effort is being applied to Thunderbird, making it an easy choice for installation.

Ubuntu 11.10 is the last release before the next Long Term Support version, so much of what we’ll be seeing on Thursday is laying the foundation for the what will be in the next version. The great thing about free software like Ubuntu is that you can use version 11.10 right now: simply follow these instructions. Similarly, you can install what will be version 12.04 long before its official release, and you can help shape the direction of that release by filing bug reports!

I’ve been upgrading my laptop to the latest version of Ubuntu pretty regularly, and I’ve never really been disappointed. The upgrade to 11.04 was a bit disconcerting at first, but the more I use it the less it bothers me. As Canonical works to improve the lens mechanism of Unity, and as third party lenses proliferate, I expect that I’ll enjoy using 11.10 more.

The Linux Foundation, the non-profit organization dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux, is adding three new companies to its membership list: Eucalyptus Systems, Nebula and Virtual Bridges. These companies “are important additions to The Linux Foundation membership,” according to The Linux Foundation’s vice president of marketing and developer programs Amanda McPherson. “The enterprise IT environment is growing more complex and Linux is helping users and vendors innovate within it. We are excited to collaborate with these companies to advance that work.”

Eucalyptus Systems — lead by Marten Mickos, former CEO of MySQL AB — provides self-hosted Infrastructure-as-a-Service clouds using commodity Linux servers. Mickos was one of the keynote speakers at the 2011 LinuxCon North America, where he observed that we, the Linux community, must strive to ensure that no one closes that which we have opened. Clearly his company’s involvement with the Linux Foundation is an effort to put his money where his mouth is. “Open source has gone from disrupting the old to innovating the new — and Linux and open source hypervisors form the main building blocks of the cloud,” said Mickos. “As pioneers of infrastructure-as-a-service software, Eucalyptus’ membership in The Linux Foundation will keep us close to technology development that is vital for the advancement of new innovations in cloud computing.”

Nebula is developing a Linux-based hardware appliance for large private cloud computing infrastructures; and Virtual Bridges provide a Virtual Desktop Infrastructure solution.

As more and more companies strive to develop “cloud” solutions, it’s clear that Linux and free software provide the best building blocks, as Mickos observed. A neutral arbiter like the Linux Foundation is an important element in the longevity of Linux. I’d expect to see even more companies pledging support to Linux and the Linux Foundation in the not-too-distant future.

It’s no secret (at least, not anymore) that Samsung is scrambling to diversify its mobile platform offerings. Bada, while smart, is kind of a bust, and Android is currently hanging in the balance until everyone figures out just what Googorola‘s plans are.

In the meantime, Samsung’s been a busy little bee, signing a deal with Microsoft to cross-license patents in exchange for Android royalties and collaboration on Windows Phone. But that’s not all. In conjunction with Intel, Samsung is backing the launch of a new open source Linux-based OS called Tizen, which will inevitably replace the recently abandoned MeeGo platform.

Hosted by the Linux Foundation, Tizen is meant for smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, netbooks, and ICE systems, and should be ready to go (both in OS and SDK form) by the first quarter of 2012. Big name members of the Linux Foundation include Fujitsu, Panasonic, NEC, Motorola, and ARM, though it’s unclear who will play a major role outside of Intel and Samsung.

With the new Tizen OS being open source and based on Linux (just like MeeGo), Intel’s Director of Open Source Technology Imad Sousou brings up a wonderful question: “Why not just evolve MeeGo?” In a blog post on the matter, he goes into detail.

We believe the future belongs to HTML5-based applications, outside of a relatively small percentage of apps, and we are firmly convinced that our investment needs to shift toward HTML5. Shifting to HTML5 doesn’t just mean slapping a web runtime on an existing Linux, even one aimed at mobile, as MeeGo has been. Emphasizing HTML5 means that APIs not visible to HTML5 programmers need not be as rigid, and can evolve with platform technology and can vary by market segment.

A question worth asking is what happens to new owners of the only MeeGo-powered phone out there, the Nokia N9. The answer, however, is a bit unclear. First, Intel promised to continue the development of MeeGo with updates already in the pipeline. But early this month, reports circulated that Intel would indeed kill MeeGo development “temporarily.” But Sousou has a response: “Over the next couple of months, we will be working very hard to make sure that users of MeeGo can easily transition to Tizen, and I will be working even harder to make sure that developers of MeeGo can also transition to Tizen.”

Another question is what happens to Bada? Samsung already has Android, Windows Phone 7 (which should become more prominent to the phone maker after the aforementioned licensing deal) and now Tizen. Diversity is a great thing, but no one ever benefited from spreading themselves too thin.

Linux and open source development is not a zero sum game. This was the explicit message from Ubuntu Technical Architect Allison Randal’s keynote speech at LinuxCon, but the sentiment had been articulated in a number of ways all week long from everyone here. The processes by which a company makes great open source software improve the world for everyone.

“Free software is a fundamentally superior model for developing software,” Randal repeated several times. In addition to the classic Linus’ Law (“given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”), Randal put forward the claim that human beings long to be part of something greater than themselves, and free software development satisfies that in spades.

According to Randal, the future of technological innovation is not stealing limited resources away from one another, but creating new resources — and new opportunities to create new resources — together in a rich ecosystem. The term “ecosystem” came up several times in my chat with Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Chairman Emeritus of IBM Academy of Technology and Dan Frye, Vice President of IBM Open Systems Development. Frye made it clear that IBM’s efforts with Linux are to be a “solutions company” as opposed to a product company. IBM doesn’t make their own Linux distribution, but they work hard to contribute to the kernel and other key open projects that bring value to IBM’s customers.

It’s all about collaboration, and working together with other open source participants. Sometimes this means collaborating with direct competitors, but IBM “gets it” that this collaboration on open source creates new resources for everyone, and they’re not in a cut throat competition for a finite number of customer dollars. Certainly they compete strenuously in a variety of markets, and sometimes they compete strenuously against the companies with whom they’re simultaneously collaborating on open source. But it’s not a zero sum game.

Wladawsky-Berger continued the “solutions company” explanation by pointing out that a skyscraper is never built by a single company. Legions of small companies with specific expertise work together under the guidance of a project manager to coordinate and execute their specific tasks in the right order. This is ultimately how IBM envisions themselves, as a leader in the open source ecosystem working to enable new workloads for their customers.

There are many ways to thrive within the open source ecosystem. Whether its an unwavering dedication to kernel excellence (a la Linus Torvalds and Greg Kroah-Hartman) or a dedication to producing viable, usable tools for everyone to use to avoid reinventing the wheel. The Yocto project is working on this for the embedded space, just as SUSE, under the fresh leadership of Attachmate, is making available their Open Build Service to help people roll packages for multiple distributions. SUSE is also sharing their SUSE Studio to allow ISVs and companies to develop and maintain their own Linux build for use in appliances and “golden master” images. You don’t have to be a SUSE customer to use these tools.

But all of this collaboration doesn’t always happen naturally. Companies are still beholden to shareholders and their bottom line, after all. So sometimes it takes a neutral third party to get the interested parties together, provide neutral ground for discussion and shepherd the communications channels. That’s where the Linux Foundation comes into play. They provide much of the framework and stewardship of the communication between competitors that result in unparalleled technical advancement across so many industries.

“Free software is a fundamentally superior model for developing software,” said Allison Randal. Eucalyptus Systems’ Marten Mickos took it one step farther: “Any company with an IT strategy needs an open source strategy.” It’s important to recognize –and embrace! — the larger ecosystem of Linux and open source software, and to find a way to collaborate within it to increase the number of available resources for which to compete.

Almost every single keynote at LinuxCon, and certainly every private conversation I had with folks here, involved “cloud” in some way. As Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst observed in his keynote, there’s no single definition of “cloud”. There’s no doubt that Amazon has really pioneered the default cloud offering, but there’s a lot of work going on to build better, more robust, and more open cloud solutions.

Red Hat has OpenShift, their Platform as a Service offering, and CloudForms, their Infrastructure as a Service offering. The long-term vision, according to Whitehurst, is that a company’s developers would begin building something on OpenShift, and not worry about any of the underlying infrastructure. When that product is ready to be deployed internally, it would go on the customer’s CloudForms installation inside the company’s firewall. Basically, developers will select the platform and operations can then own and manage that platform.

Canonical is pushing Ensemble, their “service orchestration” solution. Rather than think about applications, Canonical wants to see folks start thinking about services. Rather than deploy a web server application that talks to a database application to present information and receive input from Internet visitors, instead think of a “blog service” that you can deploy through a series of recipes. According to Canonical’s Allison Randal, Canonical feels that Amazon’s AWS sets a good standard, and the Amazon APIs should be adopted by everyone. This will allow users of cloud services to have some modicum of portability: if my cloud provider jacks up their prices, I should be able to transition smoothly to a different cloud provider — or onto my own private cloud — because the underlying mechanisms for interacting with it (the published APIs) should be the same between providers.

When Randal told me this, I was initially skeptical. If your cloud provider jacks up their prices, that’s a business problem. It’s not specific to the cloud, or to the technology sector in general. Is there real value in being able to switch from one cloud provider to another, or to bring a public cloud solution in-house? Then I listened to Marten Mickos’ keynote. Mickos, formerly CEO of MySQL AB, is now at Eucalyptus Systems pioneering private cloud solutions. His keynote touched on a couple of very interesting things.

First, he succinctly cleared up the confusion around public and private clouds and why you might want to use both. Consider the telephone. The public telephone infrastructure has been around for about a hundred years, and yet almost every company still runs their own internal PBX system. This is a pretty solid analogy with respect to clouds.

But the most interesting thing that Mickos brought up was the importance of the free software principles as applied to cloud solutions. With the old paradigm of Linux distributions, the four freedoms provided by the GPL are fundamentally essential to the long-term success of the platform, because it specifically allows derivative works. Moving to the cloud, though, we’re looking at images, rather than distributions, and the entire notion of a derivative work becomes fuzzy at best. How are the four freedoms of the GPL applied to cloud situations?

Suddenly Randal’s comments make a lot more sense. So, too, does OpenStack, a result of collaboration between RackSpace and NASA to build a common, open cloud framework.

Mickos wrapped up his keynote by reiterating that Linux has gone from a disruptive force to an innovation force. His closing remarks dovetailed very nicely with Whitehurst’s opening remarks: Linux is now the default choice for new technology deployments, and is the foundation upon which most future technical advances will be built. Both Whitehurst and Mickos observed that the transition we’re seeing now to the cloud is at least as fundamentally radical as the shift from mainframes to client/server.

As innovation continues atop Linux in the cloud, Mickos offered some very profound advice: we must strive to ensure that no one closes that which we have opened.

Photo credit: Clouds by karindalziel, on Flickr.

Following up on yesterday’s 20 Years of Linux, the Linux Foundation is releasing today an infographic highlighting some of the remarkable changes in Linux and the larger computer industry over the last twenty years. The Linux kernel had 250,000 lines of code in 1995, but had 14 million lines of code in 2010. Linux users are using it increasingly at home and at work today, rather than just at home for personal purposes.

LinuxCon is officially kicking off today, and I’ll be meeting with a number of folks from all around the Linux ecosystem, from Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst to Canonical’s Allison Randal to Nithya Ruff of Wind River Linux. If you’ve got any questions you’d like to see put to these folks, feel free to leave ‘em in the comments and I’ll see what I can do.

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the non-profit Linux Foundation, has been using Linux for about as long as I have, which is roughly half the time that Linux has been around. I recently spoke with Jim about the Linux Foundation’s upcoming LinuxCon, the history of Linux, and what might be in store for the next twenty years.

If you look at the history of computing, we see big established players dominating in their respective spaces, and then slowly wither and in some cases die altogether. 40 years ago computing was all mainframes and UNIX. Then the personal computer era began and desktop operating systems like Microsoft Windows ruled the roost — UNIX and mainframes were still around, but failed to adapt to the sea change in the primary nature of computing. In the last decase, we’ve seen an absolute explosion in mobile computing — Microsoft is still a contender but there’s no denying that they’ve been slow to react to the change in how people use computing devices.

Linux, on the other hand, has thrived across all of these platforms. There are many reasons for this, but the fundamental reason for Linux’s longevity is without a doubt its open source roots. Linus Torvalds released Linux under the GNU Public License, allowing people to use it and extend it as they needed, provided they shared their work with the rest of the world.

Zemlin digs a little deeper into the long-term value of Linux’s open source nature. According to him, it permits self-forming communities to arise to scratch their own itches. The work of these self-forming communities, and the cross-pollination between them, has given rise to unexpected benefits, where work on X has demonstrably benefitted Y. For example, work on power management in the Linux kernel for embedded devices has demonstrably improved mainframe Linux, where power consumption is a primary cost consideration.

In this way, interested parties have been able to build Linux for every conceivable computing platform: from mainframes to desktop computers to telephones to embedded devices inside televisions and automobiles. There may be no incentive for the mainframe Linux folks to work on embedded Linux, but neither is there anything inherent in Linux or its development model that precludes simultaneous development across mulitple hardware platforms.

Zemlin had many ready examples of Linux’s adaptability, all of which help ensure it’s relevance today and into the future. Playing devil’s advocate, I suggested to Zemlin that Linux was largely a reactive effort, responding to needs rather than anticipating them and forging new solutions. Zemlin was quick to counter that Linux’s development is absolutely innovative. One needs only look at the phenomenal work in the High Performance Computing market to see examples. Linux dominates 90% of the HPC market, and researchers are constantly finding new ways to make Linux excel in that space. The same holds true for embedded devices, where Linux is the de facto choice.

Linux users used to joke about “Linux world domination”. There were all manner of clever and ironic poster images of a gigantic Tux the Penguin looming over Microsoft’s corporate headquarters. These days, Linus Torvalds no longer makes those jokes. According to Zemlin, Linux is “an unstoppable force”: so much of every day life is influenced — directly or indirectly — by Linux. As Zemlin puts it, “Unless you’re Microsoft, Appe or RIM, you’re using Linux.” World domination, indeed.

It was suggested that the Linux kernel could be a good predictor of coming technologies. The Linux kernel itself gets new features much more quickly than the various Linux distributions make available. So what’s in the core kernel today will make its way to mainstream distribution in a couple months, as vendors test these new features with the rest of their stack’s components. So if you watch the kernel commits, you’ll get a good idea of where the bulk of Linux computing is headed.

Zemlin joked that he expected a number of visible mid-life crises to be on display at this year’s LinuxCon. After all, many of the major names in the open source community have literally grown up with Linux. The Linux Foundation has been working hard to ensure the next generation of innovators are ready to pick up the mantle. This year’s LinuxCon features a student program, including training scholarships for five lucky winners, allowing students the opportunity to learn development methods adn techniques directly from the major luminaries of the open source world.

More than just a big group hug to celebrate one another’s achievements, LinuxCon is an opportunity to continually advance Linux development. What might take six months of mailing list back-and-forth can be resolved in person with a five minute chat. Folks can meet like-minded developers working on similar problems to expedite problem solving, share experiences, and improve the overall state of the Linux community, which is every bit as important as the work produced by that community.

I’ll be at LinuxCon this year, speaking with developers and executives alike about the past, present and future of Linux. I’ll also be participating in the media panel where other journalists and bloggers will share their perspective on the changing nature of media coverage of Linux over the years.

If you’ll be there — or just live in Vancouver — send an email to scottm@techcrunch.com to let me know. I’d love to chat with you.

I took the quiz and got three out of five questions correct. “Linus Stalker. You know enough to be scary. Maybe you stalk LKML and know what Git is, but you have work to do on understanding the man behind the kernel.” I do, in fact, know what Git is — I’ve even used it! — but I haven’t read the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) in a very long time. Take the quiz and share your results in the comments to see how you compare to other CrunchGear readers! Who can get a perfect score? Who gets a big goose egg?

The “Could You Do Linus Torvalds’ Job?” Quiz will be live throughout the summer. When you arrive at LinuxCon, the badge you earn online will be waiting for you at the registration desk. Slap it on, and wear it with pride (or shame)!