The power base of Linux
Published: 22 Jan 2004 10:35 GMT
When Stuart Cohen signed on as chief executive of Open Source Development Labs in April, he didn't think so much of his time would be occupied with the actions of a small Utah-based company called the SCO Group.
But after SCO's legal offensive expanded from IBM to include all Linux users, Cohen -- himself subpoenaed by SCO -- decided to put the Linux consortium on the front lines. Last week, the company announced a $10m (£5.46m) legal defence fund to protect Linux users.
That fund is just a part of what happens at the consortium, which employs about 30 people, including Linux founder and leader Linus Torvalds and the programmer in charge of the new 2.6 version of Linux, Andrew Morton.
As part of its effort to become what Cohen calls "the centre of gravity of Linux," the OSDL is also drawing in government involvement and backing a Linux desktop technology push. Cohen discussed these and other issues with CNET News.com.
Q: What does the OSDL do?
A: Our mission is to become the centre of gravity for the Linux industry and to be the place where the development community, the IT vendors and the users can come together in one location. OSDL was formed three years ago by IBM, Intel, Hewlett-Packard, Computer Associates International, Fujitsu, Hitachi and NEC. It was put in place to basically test if Linux and Linux-based applications would scale for enterprise-like computing.
One of the interesting changes with OSDL is that it has expanded from the technology companies -- the IBMs and the Intels of the world -- to include customers. Unilever is probably the most prominent member. How has that changed the organisation?
Our focus has been to work with customers that deploy Linux and Linux-based solutions.
So we put a customer advisory council in place in the US, where we have approximately 20 Fortune 500 companies that participate. They have met a couple of times last year, and they are meeting [this week] at LinuxWorld. We will have a similar group in place in Europe and a similar group in place in Asia. Our plan is to specifically use those groups as the voice of the corporate user to balance the technical workgroups and the marketing workgroups of our initiatives.
How have they changed things? Have they directed the OSDL to go in a direction that you had not been going before?
There have been areas in security; there have been areas in scalability; there have been areas, as it relates to [software] porting, and certainly things like providing peace of mind for users with the pending lawsuit.
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