July 2008

I’m very pleased to welcome Brian Proffitt to the Linux Foundation. Brian will be serving as the community manager and editor for the Linux Developer Network. We’re extremely lucky to lure Brian away from Jupiter Media, where he built a thriving community and reported on Linux for such publications as Linux Today and Linux Planet.

Adding a community manager for the Linux Developer Network is an  important move for us. The LDN, while not launched yet, we hope will become a central place for the community to collaborate. As Brian mentions in this excellent article in OSstatic, the LDN will be the public-facing manifestation of all things LSB, meaning it will assist developers in writing portable applications for Linux.

But that’s certainly not all it will be. We want to make it easier for application developers to target Linux in general. We have designed the LDN  to hopefully provide a central place for collaboration and problem solving across the application development community. We also hope that other Linux loving folks may join the conversation on the site. This could evolve to include driver development, embedded, mobile, Cloud computing, general Linux documentation and so on. It’s a community site, and just like Linux, its direction will be set by those who use and participate in it.

As you can see from Brian’s response on OSstatic he holds a passion and vision for LDN:

How many thousands of developers work with free and open source software? And how much excellent documentation is out there now? I look at the efforts of the volunteers on JustLinux, or Jeremy Garcia and his team on LinuxQuestions, and I think just the answers they provide end-users are great. Now imagine the same energy from volunteers for developer-oriented content, all channeling their efforts into a centralized LDN site.

Watch this space for the launch of the LDN in the coming months. We expect great things from Brian in his new role.

Popularity: 16% [?]

The 8th Linux Foundation Japan Symposium took place last week in Tokyo.  The goal of these symposiums is to bring leading Linux luminaries to present and interact with local senior software developers, with the goal of increasing open source participation by talented Japanese developers and also fostering Linux usage in the Japanese IT industry.

Andrew Morton was on hand to speak about the status and direction of kernel development, covering kernel process material and specifically highlighting areas that need to be worked on including solid state disks and the linux-next tree.

James Morris presented on the SE Linux project, Thomas Gleixner spoke about the advantages of the Completely Fair Scheduler and Paul Moore talked about labeled networking.  Toshiharu Harada,project manager of TOMOYO Linux, was  able to explain to the developers in attendance about how to participate in Linux development and provided words of encouragement to other young developers like himself.

While the majority of the audience came from Japan, attendees came from throughout Asia.  The audience consisted almost completely of developers attending from such companies as NEC, Hitachi, Fujitsu, NTT, Sony, Toshiba, Canon and Red Hat and from universities including Tokyo University and Waseda University.  An audience survey revealed that the areas of most interest to the attendees included server, desktop and embedded with the largest technical interests focused on virtualization, process scheduler and file systems, in that order.

Andrew Morton informed the audience that about 15% of current kernel contributions are now coming from Japan - something we hope the Japan Symposiums have contributed to.

For more information on the 8th Linux Foundation Japan Symposium, please visit the following:

All speaker slides posted on LF Japan’s website: http://www.linux-foundation.jp/modules/eguide/event.php?eid=10

James Morris’ notes, photos and slides: http://james-morris.livejournal.com/31240.html

Popularity: 25% [?]