Bonum Certa Men Certa

The Linux Foundation and OIN Speak About Licensing/Law in Edinburgh

Edinburgh Castle



Summary: Commentary about the Linux Foundation's activities as of late

TThe Linux Foundation's Web sites have been full of news and PR recently. There were some major events and also a new force for promotion. Scholarships were being granted [1,2,3], a paper was released about the Long-Term Support Initiative [4,5], several happenings in New Orleans were being noted [6,7], technical articles were published (e.g. [8,9,10]), and future events were being announced (e.g. for the car industry [11]). There are several other examples [12,13,14], but the latest interesting news may come from the UK.



"Amicable communication with the Linux Foundation can help correct what this marketing-led organisation sometimes says."The LinuxCon Europe conference, which takes place in Edinburgh right now (this week), covers issues associated with licensing, including the GPL [15]. OIN speaks out (lawyers) and so does Mr. Zemlin, who is a branding/marketing person. They actually make some reasonable points and they don't overuse propaganda terms like "intellectual property" (at least based on the report from IDG, which also tried to explain how to choose a Free software licence a few weeks ago [16]). A few weeks ago the Linux Foundation finally paid a small tribute to the GNU project, congratulating it on its 30th anniversary. Linux owes its success to the GPL, the GNU project which includes GCC, and of course the philosophy of GNU, which surely attracted many developers.

What's noteworthy here is that despite our criticism of the Linux Foundation (most recently for revisionism) there are many good things to be said as well. Amicable communication with the Linux Foundation can help correct what this marketing-led organisation sometimes says. If terms like "cloud" or "intellectual property" ever take over the message of "Linux" (GNU/Linux), then we are losing credibility.

Related/contextual items from the news:



  1. Training Scholarship Winner Nam Pho Uses Linux for Science
    As a first-generation Vietnamese-American, Nam Pho says he learned to make the most of limited resources and opportunities in many facets of his life. When it came to computing, this meant dealing with secondhand hardware. He built his Linux skills through frustrating, but educational, attempts to get old computers up and working again.


  2. Training Scholarship Winner Andrew Dahl is an Aspiring Kernel Guru
    Linux Foundation Training scholarship winner Andrew Dahl is relatively new to the Linux community but he’s already jumped in to help on the XFS file system, fixing bugs and reviewing a small number of patches. As a file system engineer at SGI, he works on NFS, XFS and SGI’s CXFS (Clustered XFS.) But in his spare time he likes to dabble in Qt application development and fix kernel bugs he finds on his current hardware.


  3. Scholarship Winner Sarah Kiden Will Use Linux Training to Help Others


  4. New Paper Available: Economic Value of Long-Term Support Initiative
    The Linux Foundation today is releasing a new paper that reports on the value of the Long-Term Support Initiative (LTSI), which is a common Linux kernel base for embedded products and is maintained by the Consumer Electronics Working Group at The Linux Foundation.

    The paper reports the value of LTSI is $3 million per version. The authors of the paper arrived at the economic value of LTSI based on the methodology originally used in a highly-regarded study by David A. Wheeler and that was later used in a 2008 Linux Foundation study that estimated the value of Linux. Details of the methodology and results as applied to LTSI are on pages 5 and 6 of the report.



  5. Quick Guide to Get Ready for LTSI 3.10


  6. Excited for LinuxCon New Orleans, in GIFs


  7. LinuxCon Luncheon Connects Women in Technology
    One of the highlights of my time at LinuxCon and CloudOpen this year in New Orleans was the first-ever women in open source luncheon held the very first day of the conference. It was a real pleasure and an inspiration to see women from all backgrounds and levels of experience with Linux and open source come together to talk about their skills and interests in technology.


  8. Managing the Transition to High-Availability Linux for Mission-Critical Workloads
    High-availability (HA) Linux is increasingly being used to help companies meet market demands for fast-paced R&D and shorter product cycles. The medical industry, for example, is using server clusters to model the effect of drugs, conduct gene sequencing and develop personalized medication. Large telcos, banks and stock exchanges, ISPs and government agencies also rely on HA Linux to ensure minimal service disruptions in their mission critical workloads.


  9. Linux Kernel 3.11 Release Boosts Performance, Efficiency
    Linus Torvalds released the 3.11 “Linux for workgroups” kernel on Monday with many new features and fixes that improve performance and lower power consumption. Changes are also in keeping with recent industry trends toward the energy-efficient ARM architecture and the use of solid state drives (SSD).


  10. Brandon Philips: How the CoreOS Linux Distro Uses Cgroups


  11. Linux Foundation Announces Keynotes and Program for Automotive Linux Summit Europe Technology Leaders From Intel, Jaguar Land Rover, PSA Peugeot Citroen and more discuss Linux and open source development in the car industry


  12. Will Intel's Quark Run Linux?
    Intel left plenty of room for speculation yesterday at the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) when it announced a low-power, small-footprint processor family called the Quark. One of the biggest questions is whether it will support advanced platforms like Linux.


  13. TrueAbility Aims to Remake How Linux IT Professionals are Hired
    A GitHub account may be one of the best ways for open source developers to showcase their technical skills to potential employers. But system administrators and DevOps engineers who don’t code, don’t have an easy equivalent for proving their skills in, say, spinning up a secure server.


  14. Citrix's Mark Hinkle: Users Will Drive Innovation in Linux, Tech
    After more than 20 years of development, Linux is the largest, most successful collaborative project in the world. More than 10,000 developers from more than 1,000 companies have contributed to the Linux kernel since tracking began in 2005, according to the foundation's latest annual development report. It powers servers, mobile devices, stock exchanges, cars, appliances, air traffic control towers, the space station, genomics research... the list goes on and on. So, what's next?


  15. Open source needs more tech-savvy lawyers, Linux Foundation says
    To avoid legal difficulties when managing intellectual property for open-source projects, more tech savvy lawyers are needed, according to the Linux Foundation.

    Educating lawyers, however, is not the only solution, argued other open-source insiders at the LinuxCon Europe conference in Edinburgh this week.

    [...]

    Having lawyers with a better understanding of the technology involved in open-source projects would indeed be a way to overcome legal difficulties, said Deb Nicholson, community outreach director of the Open Innovation Network (OIN).

    “I would agree that having more tech savvy lawyers that understand open-source legal issues would be good,” Nicholson said. “Smaller companies are desperate to find someone who can advise them,” she said, adding that even if they can pay them, finding an attorney who understands the issues can be difficult.

    [...]

    While public licenses such as Creative Commons, the GNU General Public License or other free and open-source software licenses have emerged as relatively easy-to-use standardized copyright agreements, more work can be done to make licensing easier, according to Maracke.


  16. How to Choose the Best License for Your Open Source Software Project
    Getting the right license for your open source project can mean the difference between success and failure for your software.




Recent Techrights' Posts

[Video] Richard Stallman's Talk in Sweden, Attended by Nearly 700 People, is Now Online
The Web page is in Swedish, but the talk is in English
Coping With the Site Going More Mainstream
Fame is no laughing matter
21 Pages in Less Than 7 Hours is No Joking Matter
We've become a lot more effective and efficient
Generation Chaff - Phase V: Censorship of Dissent (Painted as Harassment or Terrorism)
Censorship is all around us now
Generation Chaff - Phase IV: Apps Only Few Companies Decide On
Tools are being collectively confiscated, under the premise or false prospect of "security"
 
The Serial Slopper Starts Up - or Restarts - His Plagiarism Machine (LLMs)
Serial Sloppers like these don't belong in news sites. That's why he got sacked by BetaNews.
Links 24/10/2025: Esperanto Music History, Anxiety, and New Portals
Links for the day
Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity.com, Linux Journal, and Pet Slopfarms of Google News
Why does Google News still advance these fake sites to the top of search results?
Links 24/10/2025: Inequality Grows, Billion-Dollar Scam Center Industry
Links for the day
Links 24/10/2025: "Independent Media in Cambodia is Collapsing" and Serious F5 Breach
Links for the day
They Never 'Put Down' Corporations
There are "pests" that are traded in Wall Street
Correct Information is a Valued Asset in the Age of Slopfarms and Public Relations (PR) or Spin
Publishing suppressed facts is never easy
The Register MS Continues to Bag Money to Promote a Ponzi Scheme, Even Money From China
Today in the front page
analytics.usa.gov: The Only Supported Version of Windows (This Past Week) is Only Used by About 13.9% of People in the US, the Home Base of Windows
Even Vista 7 is still used more
Rust is Very Secure
If only Rust itself is secure
Who Will be Held Accountable for Breaking Ubuntu by Imposing Rust on Otherwise-Functional Programs, in Effect Replacing GNU With Proprietary Microsoft (GitHub)?
they're practical people who merely point out that a bunch of buffoons not only ruin Ubuntu but also every future distro based on Ubuntu
Generation Chaff - Phase VIII: In Summary
Like "Science" with a capital "S", what we see here commercial interests usurping everything
Generation Chaff - Phase VII: Curtailing Alternative Media
There was always an obligation - a collective duty of sorts - to uphold independent journalism
Generation Chaff - Phase VI: Centralisation of Information (X, Cheetok/Fentanylware)
Would you trust information when controlled by such people?
Generation Chaff - Phase III: Slop and Plagiarism
A lot of the current so-called 'economy' is built upon false valuations
Generation Chaff - Phase II: "Cloud", Blockchains and Other Hype
For those of us who turned down those propositions there was a struggle; we needed to justify not having skinnerboxes or "social" accounts in some site run by a private company
Generation Chaff - Phase I: Social Control Media
IRC predates the Web
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, October 23, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, October 23, 2025
More Clues Shed on Collapse of Microsoft XBox
XBox is basically circling down the drain as Microsoft implements 2-3 waves of layoffs each month
'Vibe Coding' Doesn't Work
In a lot of ways, so-called 'Vibe Coding' is already considered vapourware or a passing fad promoted in the media by managers who try to justify mass layoffs, especially ridding companies of "very expensive" software engineers
Links 24/10/2025: Microsoft's Killing of XBox Connected to Revenue/Profit Problems, "How Elon Musk Ruined Twitter"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 24/10/2025: 86,400 Seconds and "Society's Task"
Links for the day
Slopwatch: Google News and Slopfarms That Relay Nonsense From LLMs
Google News, which once prioritised or used to care about provenance and quality, is feeding slopfarms
Links 23/10/2025: More Health Concerns Over Dumb Chatbots (LLMs) and "Talking Cars" as Latest Buzz
Links for the day
Gemini Links 23/10/2025: Daylight Savings Time and Duration Shorthand
Links for the day
Links 23/10/2025: LLM 'Hallucinations' (Defects) in Practical Code 'Generation', China Becomes More Economically and Technologically Independent
Links for the day
Why We Support Richard Stallman and You Probably Should Too
It's not about being "Richard Stallman fan", it is about maintaining the right to hold positions (on technology) like his
Linux Foundation Uses LLM Slop to Promote Microsoft in Linux.com (Again), Rendering It a Linux-Hostile Slopfarm
Openwashing with slop by "Linux.com Editorial Staff", which basically seems to be a bot
Some Large German Media Covers Richard Stallman's Talks in Germany Earlier This Week
LLM-based chatbots are just "bullshit generators" (as he has long called them)
Links 23/10/2025: Windows TCO Galore and "The Internet Is Going to Break Again"
Links for the day
Trouble in Red Hat/IBM and a Retreat to Ponzi Economics in Search of Wall Street Market Heist
Would you invest your life savings in this kind of crap?
Who Asked Software in the Public Interest (SPI) for a Refund? ($100,000, Resulting in Losses of $267,201 in 12 Months, Highest-Ever Losses)
The IRS does not reveal who or what's tied to this refund (or the cause/reason)
Social engineering attack: Debian voted to trick you on binary blobs
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Techrights Will Always Stand for Women's Rights
We even invest money - personal savings that it - in our principles
Certified Lawyers Should Know Better (Than to Intimidate Us With Man Who Drives on Motorcycle Through a Really Bad Storm Between Distant Cities, Then Collects Photos of Our Home)
Mentioning someone was in prison for bad things isn't a crime, it's a public service
The "AI" (Slop) Bubble is Already Imploding
"ChatGPT Usage Has Peaked and Is Now Declining, New Data Finds"
The So-called "Sexy" Buckets (AI, Quantum) Cannot Save IBM From Reality, Shares Tank
"No matter how much financial hocus-pocus they use to reclassify revenues to land in the "sexy" buckets (AI, Quantum), it still smells old and musty - just like this company."
Paul Krugman is Wrong About the Scope of Mass Layoffs in the United States
A few years ago society was accelerating its journey towards feudalism, boosted by COVID-19
Links 23/10/2025: Proprietary Blunders and CISA's Latest Disclosure of Holes
Links for the day
Gemini Links 23/10/2025: Fast Past (F1), 99.9% Uptime
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, October 22, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, October 22, 2025
Slopwatch: Google News is Promoting Fake 'Articles' About Fake Xubuntu, Fake Articles About Replacing Windows With GNU/Linux
The quality of the Web deteriorates and unless someone cleans up the mess, real sites will lose an incentive to produce anything
When "AI Layoffs" Mean Layoffs Due to the "AI" Bubble Popping
many people that are laid off by Microsoft claim to be specialists in "AI"
Mysterious grant forfeited, $100,000 from Software in the Public Interest accounts 2023
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Evidence: bullying, student union behaviour: Armijn Hemel's FSFE resignation
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Evidence: psychological abuse, stalking, Galia Mancheva, Susanne Eiswirt ignored by FSFE judgment for Matthias Kirschner
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Helping FSFE scam victims and conference organisers
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Nigerian fraud in FSFE constitution
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Worrying and Amusing Stories of "Clown Computing" Gone Awry
Many of these disasters could be avoided
Links 22/10/2025: Amazon Plans to Replace Workers With Robotics, AWS and Clown Computing in General Ridiculed
Links for the day
Gemini Links 22/10/2025: Niri Completely Changes Multitasking and Overview of Diff-ers
Links for the day
Links 22/10/2025: Study on Misinformation by Slop and Heavily Debt-Sabbled Microsoft OpenAI (ClosedSlop) Uses "Browser" as Gimmick/Distraction
Links for the day
They've Already Spent Close to a Million Dollars on Lawyers and Sent Us About 50 KG of Legal Papers (Sponsored by Mysterious Third Party) to Try to Censor Techrights, Without Success
They try to overcompensate with sheer volume for a lack of solid, clear arguments (we are the victims here)
12 Months Ago the 'Hulk Hogan of UEFI' Officially Went 'Tag-Team'
We're actually sort of flattered or proud that such despicable people are so desperate to censor us
"Cloud Computing" Was Always a Joke, But This Week Was the Punchline
Maybe stop following tech trends and fashions
"Cloud Computing" Does Not Mean Safety
Fault tolerance is related to the notion of software freedom
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, October 21, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, October 21, 2025
The Fall of Windows: From Something to Nothing
Of course Microsoft will pretend everything is fine and "just trust the hey hi" (AI)