Articles about The Linux Foundation

HP has made numerous outreach attempts to the open source community, even going so far as to donate webOS not long after they purchased Palm for $3.3 billion. Now, the company has donated a whopping $500,000 USD to the Linux Foundation in order to become a Platinum member, joining several other large corporations like Samsung, NEC, Oracle and Intel. The Foundation is a nonprofit organization that dedicates itself to spreading the Linux family.

While Linux never quite became the popular desktop alternative that many hoped it would, it does power the vast majority of the servers that run the Internet. Even desktop operating systems like Ubuntu have become much more user friendly, and many flavors of the OS are capable of running on less powerful machines than those needed to run Windows and OSX. Hewlett Packard has long built servers for Linux-based systems, and even their printers, which can be found in many homes and businesses, run on the platform. The company has been a lesser-tier member of the Foundation for some time.

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If someone sells you a defective piece of software, what rights do you have? If the retailer doesn't offer a return policy, as you may very well know -- especially if you ever read the End-User License Agreement, wherever it might be located -- your ability to hold the manufacturer liable may be very limited, if not non-existent. Since the 1990s, Microsoft has been an active opponent of changes to laws and regulations that allow the sale of software to be treated as an exchange of services rather than a sale of goods -- changes that one software development lawyer in 1997 warned would "have a far more damaging effect on software publishing competition and on the quality of software products than anything being done solely by Microsoft today."

But now, Microsoft's principal competition in the operating system field has joined sides with it in opposing the latest efforts by a panel of prominent judges and attorneys to reform the protocols for developing software sales contracts and warranties. The Linux Foundation is now on record as opposing changes to warranties, and has co-authored a document with Microsoft to that effect, as Microsoft revealed last Sunday.

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Is Adobe playing catch-up in the open source development field? Or is the open source community not giving it enough of that valuable feedback it's so well-known for. This morning, Adobe's giving the community an extra chance.

The stated goal of Adobe since 2006 has been to build an operating environment using its Flash technologies, that is truly cross-platform and that can run offline. To accomplish that for real, Adobe needed to embrace more platforms outside the traditional box than just Macintosh; so today, even if the current build isn't ready for prime time, the company released what it's describing as a feature-incomplete version of the AIR platform for Linux.

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In the wake of curious surges in the memberships of national standards bodies, as well as the ISO, prior to upcoming votes to recommend or approve the adoption of Microsoft's Office Open XML as an international standard, the Linux Foundation today pleaded with voters worldwide (both old and new) to listen to reason before making their decisions. But the reasons they're giving have been heard before, and may not be enough to suppress the sudden surges of support for OOXML among national bodies' swelling ranks.

"The Linux Foundation is not only familiar with, but has a vested interest in the preservation of the validity and integrity of the global standards adoption process," writes the Foundation's marketing director, Amanda McPherson, in a statement released today

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In an op-ed piece published by BusinessWeek today, Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin stated his organization will be ready to fund the legal efforts of anyone who produces Linux software who's threatened with - or sued on account of - patent infringement. If necessary, Zemlin writes, the foundation will use its own patent portfolio to mount countersuits.

"Touch one member of the Linux community, and you will have to deal with all of us," reads Zemlin's article. "Microsoft is not the only - perhaps not even the largest - owner of patents in this area. Individual members of the Linux ecosystem have significant patent portfolios. Industry groups, such as the Open Innovation Network and our own legal programs at the Linux Foundation, aggregate our membership's patents into an arsenal with which to deter predatory patent attacks. With our members' backing, the Linux Foundation also has created a legal fund to defend developers and users of open-source software against malicious attack. We don't expect to but, if needed, we will use this fund to defend Linux."

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