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Six years ago, Jane Silber met Mark Shuttleworth at a party in London. Having started at Canonical just over a week later, she is now stepping into Shuttleworth’s shoes as the CEO of the company behind the Ubuntu Linux distribution. Even before working as chief operations officer at Canonical (a role now filled by the OSS live wire and blogger Matt Assey), Silber had an impressive CV, having worked as VP of a $45 million business unit at General Dynamics Corp in the US, as well as holding a portfolio of degrees from Vanderbilt University, the University of Oxford, and Haverford College. We caught up with Jane (virtually at least) on a business trip to Lexington, Massachusetts…

With a few months under your belt, what is the most exciting part of your new role and what are you most looking forward to?
The most exciting thing is seeing the traction Ubuntu has as a mainstream choice for consumers. The alignment between Ubuntu, the community, developers and the hardware ecosystem is really coming into its own at this point. In my new role I am involved in more strategic discussions with our partners and customers, and the road ahead is looking very exciting.

Working in between two of the most notorious OSS party kids (Mark and Matt), the pair of them permanently out playing with their friends, is there a part of you that feels like the mum of the Ubuntu/Canonical executive family?
You mean they are out playing with their friends? They keep telling me how hard they are working! The global nature of our staff, combined with the open community development practices in Ubuntu, means that we give our employees a lot of autonomy while at the same time expecting results. As CEO, I feel responsible for the overall health and well-being of the company, but that isn’t in a stereotypical mothering way. If you were searching for a mothering analogy, it may be more like the bird who kicks the fledglings out of the nest and expects them to be successful. And fortunately, given that we have so many very talented and dedicated people, they are!

Your promotion from within the company has been seen as business as usual for Canonical and you have even been quoted as saying: “Don’t expect a dramatic change in strategy”. Are you really just a steady hand on the tiller? Is there nothing you want to do to differently or improve now that you are at the helm?
I am not ‘just’ a steady hand, but it is one of the things I bring to the role. Particularly for a platform provider, there is real value in steadiness and reliability at the tiller. That’s true not just internally at Canonical, but also for our users, customers and partners. These days there are many new entrants in the OS field with little track record to point to, and there are OS providers leaving the field or changing their strategy. We know from experience how challenging it is to reliably produce an OS, and to work in concert with OEMs, ISVs and the community to ensure the quality of product and its widespread use. We continue to produce Ubuntu in accordance with the principles we laid out six years ago, and we continue to be a reliable partner and service supplier for OEMs, ISVs and enterprise users. I view steadiness, a proven track record and reliability as assets.
That’s not to say we are sitting still, and of course there are areas where we will do things differently. We continue to innovate in Ubuntu itself (eg the Unity desktop environment), in best practices for transparency in open source development that is unmatched by any other OS in product development and partnerships (eg shipping Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud as part of the Dell Cloud Partner Program) and many other areas. And as Linux in general, and Ubuntu in particular, reaches new classes of users well beyond the traditional early adopters, that combination of steadiness, innovation and delivery is required. We are constantly evaluating and improving our execution and delivery, and I intend to continue to lead us to in that direction.

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In this month’s in-depth interview, Linux User & Developer talks to Qt program manager Volker Hilsheimer about his perception of the company’s technology and the ways in which developers are using it to push forward user interface development. With a long and successful history in desktop application development and the industrial embedded market, Qt today is increasing in popularity in the mobile segment and is now well into its second year of open source existence, although the product is still licensed for commercial use.

With the release of Qt 4.7 now at the beta stage, the current emphasis upon speed of development and robustness within final deployment has deeply positive undercurrents, which swell both from Qt and from its community of contributors. More specifically, the Qt Quick user interface (UI) creation kit now hands UI designers the opportunity to deliver working code back into the total development shop effort so that UIs are built from a true look and feel perspective like never before. So have we really turned a new corner in interface creation?…

You say that Qt’s cross-platform application framework provides developers with the power to write once and then allow deployment to many devices without rewriting the source code. Doesn’t this mean that some functionality compromises will always have to be made if you aim to stretch an app from the desktop to embedded and then onward to a mobile device?

As you stated, Qt supports many platforms, from the desktop to embedded and mobile devices. The function of a Qt application is up to the developer, and there are obviously vast differences between some of the devices across the platforms we support – for example, a Windows 7 laptop versus a Symbian smartphone.

There are many examples of Qt apps running across platforms within a common platform type – such as Google Earth running across different desktop platforms, and WordPress for Nokia running across mobile platforms. In the case of writing an application and then deploying it onto very diverse platforms (such as a mobile platform and a desktop platform) there are definitely special challenges because of differences in factors such as input methods, device usage paradigms and hardware capabilities.

In terms of how much code can be reused for the user interface, this needs to be the decision of the application developer. Up to now, Qt has definitely been optimised for ‘code reuse’, and I believe that this will continue to be a very important aspect, in particular for the application logic, even across form factors. However, for the user interface there clearly is a need for a technology that allows application developers and designers to easily redefine, modify, customise or even completely rewrite the code so that the application can provide an optimal user experience.

Our upcoming UI creation kit Qt Quick offers exactly that – if you want your application to be available across device categories, then let your UI designers and developers use Qt Quick to write the optimal user interfaces for each form factor and platform that you are targeting. The declarative language in which UIs are expressed is optimised for exactly that. The C++ code implementing your application logic will continue to be reusable across all platforms, and you can decide where to draw the line between reusing and customising code.

Qt Quick uses the solid and native technologies that Qt developers are familiar with – like QGraphicsView and the Qt Animation Framework – and these, combined with a declarative language, make it easy to define smooth animations. Put simply, QGraphicsView uses two important elements of the Qt platform: the Qt Animation Framework and the QStateMachine between the different ‘states’ the application could be in across different platforms and/or devices.

Also look at QAction tool – which allows the developer to identify an item on a menu bar entry or an item attached to a softkey and manage that action (or a set of actions) within an application in a completely platform-independent way – and you can see why we take our cross-platform pedigree quite seriously.

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Several years ago mainframes were written off as expensive, dated computers that were only capable of running large business applications, and many predicted the end of the mainframe. But today, thanks in no small part to Linux, companies are taking a critical look at their workloads and recognising that they need outstanding reliability, availability and serviceability to manage their mission-critical workloads, and the mainframe uniquely fulfils this business requirement.

As senior Novell VP, you have seen some broad implementations of SUSE Linux Enterprise in mainframe environments over the last decade. What typifies a successful deployment today in your opinion?
From a business standpoint, an implementation is only successful if our customers can achieve their business objectives: consolidation of workloads, lower costs for infrastructure and licences, reduced complexity in their daily administration work, meeting requirements for better energy efficiency (power, cooling, physical space), improved hardware utilisation, and addressing security and compliance demands. From a technical point of view, it is very successful if we don’t get too many support calls [laughing].

Along the hard fought path towards enterprise-level acceptance, SUSE has recorded certain milestones such as passing ISV and IHV certification. How important do you feel these (or other) landmark developments have been in terms of where Linux sits now?
Certifications are extremely important, whether they are ISV, IHV, LSB or security certifications. It reassures customers that there is an entire ecosystem of professional organisations focused on making an enterprise platform like Linux both stable and secure. It reinforces to the customer that there is a past, a present and a future for the solutions running in
their enterprises.

Prior to your position at Novell you were chief technology officer for the Linux Foundation. What standards were you involved in that have crucially shaped mainframe implementation?
One of the important goals shared by the Linux ecosystem participants is to maintain a certain similarity between the various flavours of Linux. The Linux Foundation develops a set of standards called the ‘Linux Standards Base’ (LSB), which provides Linux distribution vendors as well as application vendors with a runtime environment as well as directions covering, for example, the layout of the files on the hard disk. This framework allows Linux distributors to develop a product that ensures a standardised operating system base for application vendors. Given the cross-hardware platform approach of our SUSE Linux Enterprise product, this frame applies equally well to the x86 space as it does to the mainframe space.

In order to become a fully fledged commercial beast, enterprise Linux on the mainframe needed to overcome certain hurdles – such as new compilers, libraries and some base packages – throughout its life cycle. What aspects of making Linux viable commercially have been the most challenging?
The mainframe market is a very mature and conservative market – customers do not just expect reliability, availability and serviceability, they live it. When introducing and establishing a product like SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for System z in this market, it’s not enough to have outstanding technology. Our customers need to trust the company they are buying from. For us, the most challenging aspect in bringing Linux to the mainframe was establishing the right level of confidence with the customers. Together with IBM we have done exactly that – we’ve created enough interest in bringing new workloads to the mainframe and helping our customers discover the cost savings potential with Linux. Today more than 70% of all IBM mainframe customers run Linux on z.

In December of 2008, the Ruby on Rails community was at a crossroads. The mainline Rails project was losing ground to Merb, an alternative open source MVC framework for building Ruby applications. The community was fragmenting. Yehuda Katz was the creator of the Merb framework, and rather than continue on with that project, he and his fellow contributors decided to merge Merb and Rails. The decision sparked a number of Rails homecomings for other outside projects, and in February the first beta of an integrated Rails 3.0 arrived. We sat down with Katz to discuss the past, present and future of Ruby on Rails.

How have things been on Rails since the merge with Merb?
It’s been good. The interesting thing that’s happened since that is a lot of other Ruby projects have done it. There’s a tool called Webrat, which is a full stack testing tool; and abstraction around HTML Unit. Someone said I can make it better,
they called it Capybara and they pushed it into Rails.

Also, Micronaut. It’s basically guys who said “we can do rspec better”. This has started to happen in the Ruby community, and it makes me happy. I think there is too much in the open source world of people building
software because you want to put your name back out there.

That’s been a positive outcome. Also the Rails core team diversity has been very helpful. Rails core, before, was 37Signals and some people doing client work. Now we have people doing custom development around it. We have people working on problems we didn’t have before. It’s definitely caused us, both people who are new and veteran contributors, to question our assumptions. The conclusions have been almost 100% positive.

The community has gotten a lot healthier since the merge. Like Rails was getting stagnant. A lot of people who are coming back now are coming to Rails to first contribute. A big chunk of the time I spend every day on Rails is cat herding. And trying to balance the need to be involved in the architecture of the thing, and getting things done by real people interested in doing things.

We hear things are being uncoupled, starting with Prototype?
Unobtrusive JavaScript. Rails is no longer coupled to Prototype. That was a community effort. DHH tweeted “we’re running behind”, and a community formed out of the ether. Less than a week later it’s all done. Basically, what Rails did before, when you said ‘link to remote’, like, I want a link that when you click it makes an AJAX request and when it comes back, put it in a div. In Rails onclick, you would have to go through and find all those places where you used Prototype and remove that reference. People made shims they got out of sync. The way it works in Rails 3, it’s straight HTML: a href = ‘actual URL’ and it uses the HTML 5 data tag. It supports custom attributes. We’ve created a library that says ‘find any links and wire them up’. Anybody else in other libraries like Dojo who want this benefit just have to write JavaScript and not Ruby. Before, having someone go and hack in the helpers and such required someone on both sides of the fence at all times.

What are the biggest changes for Rails 3.0?
The biggest thing is security. We went through the known remaining security vulnerabilities based on having spoken to Twitter and having them say “your security tools are too manual right now” [to prevent cross-site-scripting vulnerabilities]. Almost every framework says if you use user content, just escape it. It’s easy to forget to escape it. As an attacker, you have to find the places in web applications where they forgot to escape. What we’ve essentially done is made Rails pessimistic by default. If you try to put in a string into HTML at any time, we automatically escape it. We went through all of Rails’s internals and marked the form tags as safe, which means that for the vast majority of cases, users won’t have to do a lot. But there will be cases where they were relying on content input by the user that was unsafe. But it’s now almost impossible to have an accidental XSS attack.

We’ve also gone into cross-site request forgery (CSRF) protection. We were pretty rock solid before, but there were cases where we were blacklisting things which were not vectors for an attack. We made it less annoying to work with the systems. If there was a form you were submitting with JavaScript, you had to form a token even though that was not a possible vector. This makes it less likely for people to turn [CSRF protection] off.

The second big thing is improving interoperability, mainly with other Ruby libraries. We’ve gone through Rails systematically, and found where we were coupling ourselves to ourselves and removed those. Rails controller view code is no longer coupled to the models, so you can use any views you want. We also added support other templating languages. We made it a lot easier to support other testing frameworks. TestUnit was standard, and others had to do a lot of work to strip out our support for TestUnit and add their own. Using rspec felt worse than using TestUnit. TestUnit itself is a plug-in now.

Just who are you?

Then, as a sideline, I do other stuff like the NCR voyager port (a Micro Channel non-APIC-based SMP system, the last production year for them being 1999). At Plumbers last year, Qualcomm gave me an Android developer phone, so I’ve also been hacking on that, although mainly user-space stuff to make it work the way I want it to.
I’m also quite heavily involved on the ‘governance’ side of Linux (if our system of management can be called that). I’m chair of the Linux Foundation technical advisory board (its main job is to act as a resource for the Linux Foundation and its members on matters of open source, and also to raise issues we have which we’d like the LF to help with). As part of that job, I’m also on the board of the Linux Foundation itself.

What are the exciting changes for .33?
I think the most exciting change is that after years of arguing, the DRBD (Distributed Replicating Block Device) finally got accepted into the mainline. It’s the foundation of a lot of high availability and disaster recovery solutions (including our own SLE HA extensions).

The next new piece of technology is I/O bandwidth controllers. There had been about two competing ideas about how this should be done, and it took two rounds of discussion at the Linux file system and storage summit and finally a troubleshooting session at the kernel summit to get final agreement. (I/O controllers allow for much better fine-grained control over how I/O bandwidth is allocated to virtual machines.)

Finally, the ftrace subsystem acquired dynamic tracing in 2.6.33. That’s a step to taking it a lot closer to rivalling the functionality of Sun’s dtrace.
I’m afraid these three are all pretty much enterprise features. The most visible change for users is probably the merging of the Noveau driver, which is a reverse-engineered driver for the Nvidia graphics chipset. Hopefully it will finally allow us to move towards ending the pain a significant number of desktop users have with the Nvidia binary graphics driver.

Was there some sort of kerfuffle about the Completely Fair Scheduler slowing down certain video processes?
I assume you’re referring to the Kasper Sandberg benchmarks?

I wasn’t aware of that specific one, but I am aware that we’ve been getting a lot of latency problems with the CFS scheduler, which seem to be at the root of the benchmark problems the graph shows. Arjan van de Ven has been doing the most work on this with his LatencyTOP tool (the performance issues show up on the desktop, which is why Intel is concerned). LatencyTOP found some significant bugs in the CFS implementation on .32, which have hopefully been fixed in .33 …although there will surely be more to uncover and fix.
The process scheduler is about the most complex heuristic system we have in the kernel, so completely rewriting it was bound to have a few teething troubles (although it’s fair to say that the scheduler has always been a sore spot with a variety of people). It’s probably going to take another few kernel releases to get the rough edges smoothed off. The problem with this type of smoothing is that although the scheduler people try to test with a variety of workloads, they can’t match the diversity of real-life situations. So scheduler tuning ends up being a very public affair because you have to do it iteratively as the results come in.

It becomes even more fraught because when you have an optimally implemented system (as in no bugs sucking performance), the tuning is a zero sum game – improve the performance under workload X and you can end up penalising workload Y – so not everyone agrees where the optimal point in the tuning space lies. However, I know the scheduler people quite well, and I’m confident they have the ability and the tenacity and the commitment to give us as close to the best possible tuning as is humanly possible.

Miguel de Icaza is a polarising figure amongst licence jockeys like Richard Stallman, but there is no denying his ability to get things done. We caught up with Miguel and asked him about Mono, Gnome, and all of the various things in Linux he touches in his role as a Fellow at Novell and project lead for Mono.

What’s up with Mono? What are you working on now and what’s slated for the future?
Oh, we are working on various new goodies. Mono 2.6 is about to ship, and it includes some major cool features:
• LINQ to SQL in Mono
• Support for LLVM for code generation on server configurations
• Most of C# 4.0 is now supported
• The Dynamic Language Runtime is now part of Mono. This is an open source library that Microsoft released and that we are now consuming.
• New soft-debugging technology, originally developed for Mono on the iPhone
• An open source MSBuild implementation called xbuild.
• The Mono runtime finally has a full security infrastructure for running untrusted code side-by-side with trusted code (this was required by Moonlight)
• Our innovative SIMD support in Mono now works on AMD64 class architectures
• The first release of Mono. Tasklets, a continuation framework used mostly by game developers

A couple of recent major milestones are:
• Mono for the iPhone: the MonoTouch products, a major effort to simplify iPhone development and bring garbage collection, type safety and all of the features from .NET to iPhone developers.
• We have also just released a plug-in to Visual Studio that allows developers to move their applications from Windows to Linux, create RPM packages from Visual Studio and even use our SUSEStudio.com website to create full appliances from their software projects.

Unlike Microsoft’s LINQ to SQL that is limited to SQL server, our LINQ to SQL implementation exposes the same API, but depending on the connection string passed, it will generate SQL code for the appropriate database (the usual suspects: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQL Server and so on).

We are also shipping a new debugger technology that brings the debugging experience for developers to the same levels that they expect from modern IDEs. We are quite proud of the work on this area. Now, this is only the stuff that we have prepared for Mono 2.6. We are currently hard at work for the 2.8 and 3.0 releases of Mono. Some of the major projects include:

• Completing C# 4.0 (in 2.6 we have most of it, but we are missing some of the dynamic support; with 2.8 we will complete it).
• A new garbage collector that will compact the heap (the sgen garbage collector). This addresses one of the most important limitations in Mono.
• Implementation of the Communications Foundation, although we do have a partial implementation today (enough to support Silverlight). We are hard at work to complete this framework.
• Work towards Silverlight 3 and 4.

Greg Kroah-Hartman is a Linux kernel maintainer, and head of the Linux Drivers Project. He is a Novell Fellow, and works on the SUSE distribution for that company. At the Linux Foundation, Kroah-Hartman has helped to compile the “Who Writes Linux?” survey for the past few years. We caught up to him to talk about his work past, present and future on the Linux kernel.

What was the first driver you ever wrote?
For Linux, it was a USB to Serial driver. That was back in 1999.

Do you ever work on drivers for devices that have no documentation or company behind them? Black boxes, where you have to reverse engineer to figure out how to write a driver?
Yes, I did work on drivers like this, in fact my very first driver was written that way, as was a number of other drivers I wrote afterward. Then I started asking vendors for specifications, and they started sending them to me, and I have not had to reverse engineer anything for the past 10 years, thankfully.

How many people work on the Linux Driver Project?
We have over 400 developers on our mailing list, but actual number of developers goes up and down depending on the numbers of drivers under active development. So it’s hard to nail down a solid number.

What devices are in need of the most love from the Linux driver community? Printers? Cameras? What’s neglected?
Printers are all handled with userspace drivers, the Linux Printing Project. Ask them how well they are doing, all of my recent printers “just worked” when I plugged them into my Linux machines, so their development efforts seem to be quite good. I do not know of any areas that are neglected these days. There are always individual devices that are not supported from various companies, but overall, I do not know of any class of devices that are not supported on Linux today.

If you could choose any device in the world to write a driver for, what would it be?
I personally like writing USB drivers as I know that subsystem the best. Right now I’m just having a hard time finding devices to write drivers for, everything seems to “just work” with Linux these days. Actually I take that back, I am supposed to be writing a SCSI driver right now, and the company involved is being very patient in my slow development effort. So I need to get back to writing a SCSI driver, so that should be the device I should want to write a driver for.

What advice can you offer to someone who wants to write their first driver for Linux?
Read the file in the kernel source tree, Documentation/HOWTO and then read the files that it points you to. It has lots of links to files online and to books that are good to read.

What advice can you offer to someone about to do a black box reverse engineering of a device, as you used to do so long ago?
Not to do it
Seriously, see Tridge’s great resources for doing reverse engineering if you are interested in it. He has a bunch of links and talks about how to do this properly.

For Who Writes Linux: which company or entity did you see grow the most between last year and this? How about over the last 5 years?
For last year to this, Intel. Intel has done a great job in contributing in very large ways to the kernel tree. They did this by both hiring people who were active in the community, and by mentoring and allowing internal contributors to do more work. It’s a great success story. As for the past 5 years, sorry, I haven’t kept the statistics for longer than 4 years so I do not know.

Has Canonical stepped up and contributed more patches to Linux this year?
No they have not.

Klaus Knopper teaches at the Kaiserslautern University of Applied Sciences where he lectures in software engineering and software technology and occasionally gives seminars and talks about open source in various parts of the IT industry. Klaus received his diploma in electrical engineering from the Kaiserslautern University of Technology, which in German is die Technische Universität Kaiserslautern. He co-founded LinuxTag in 1996, a Linux exhibition which has not really seen any competition from anywhere. He has been a self-employed information technology consultant since 1998. As well as all of this he started the Knoppix GNU/Linux distribution. Knoppix is something of a legend as far as system administrators and computer repair technicians are concerned. Most people who know about it have a healthy respect for it. Linux User & Developer was able to catch up with Klaus in the middle of his busy schedule and ask him some questions about himself….

Did you always have an interest in technology when you were younger ?
Your guess is right, I was always interested in technology. As a child, I had a lot of fun taking machines and electronic devices apart in order to understand how they work. And in most cases I was able to reassemble them without major loss of functionality. My main technical fascination in school was visualisation of electromagnetic fields, which I explored by building a tesla transformer that produced high enough voltage in order to take pictures of the air glowing around various object shapes. I studied and did my masters degree in electrical engineering. My initial plan was building solar cars and solar power plants, but somehow my interests during studying were shifted towards computer operating systems. At that time before WWW, having internet access at the university and using nowadays quite ‘ancient’ services like kermit file transfer, nntp and uucp and making contact with UNIX users worldwide was something new and exciting for me. I picked up jobs at the university in UNIX system administration, and co-founded Germany’s first students UNIX-AG, a research and self-teaching group of students with the goal to learn more about UNIX and networks. From this group LinuxTag evolved a few years later.

Any funny stories or other things that happened when you were at the university?
I was known to often state: “I hate computers, they are stupid, ill-designed, incompatible and start failing as soon as you start relying on them.” I can still stand by this statement, since I’m more of a person who uses software for real work and fun, regardless of which hardware it runs on, and I’m in no way a ‘computer freak’. I enjoy times when I am away from computers. Unfortunately, this has become difficult these days.

You were a founding member of the UNIX-AG at the University of Kaiserslautern. Would you like to tell us something about that?
In 1990, it was not common at our university to have internet access as a student, especially not for students of the informatics faculty, strangely. The only computers connected to the internet were UNIX boxes, so naturally, there was a high interest in self-education of this operating system and its possibilities for students who did not have UNIX as part of their regular lectures. With some budget from the German government, we founded a students association with the goal of education in modern computer and internet technologies. The computer department provided rooms for us and our newly bought UNIX computers, and we had a great time learning everything about UNIX and programming under UNIX. A lot of UNIX-related projects including the German chess server were initiated at this time at the university of Kaiserslautern, and we had regular meetings and seminars explaining what we did, which were open to the general public. This probably cost me a few additional semesters of studying time, but from what I learned in the UNIX-AG, I not only had a great hobby, but it also made me ready for my main work field job later as a freelance consultant.

So, what made you interested enough to produce Knoppix?
Knoppix was rather an experiment with later, unexpected popularity, than a product. In 1999, self-contained bootable mini-CDs with a tiny Linux-based rescue system became popular at various computer expos and conferences. I just wanted to understand how booting from CD worked, and after this, create a full-sized CD that contained programs and tools that I frequently used myself, in order to have my own software equipment ready-to-run with me, without the need to also carry around an expensive computer. In 2000, I had the opportunity to give a talk about ‘creating a self-contained, auto-configuring Linux system on an iso9660 file system’ at the Atlanta Linux Showcase. I got a lot of feedback, hints and tips for improvement from the people listening to the talk, so I decided to make the project public in order to get more information about use cases and hardware that I had no access to personally. Due to many requests for inclusion of software, the DVD version was created. Today there is so much cool free software around that I have to carefully select even for DVD-size. Apparently, there would be enough software to fill a double-layer DVD already.

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Jim Zemlin is executive director of the Linux Foundation.

There, he heads up the non-profit group’s efforts to push new standards and bring cohesion to the Linux ecosystem. Since its creation, the Linux Foundation has led the charge towards fixing some of Linux’s classic problems, such as a lack of drivers for Windows-specific hardware, and the ever-present printing problems. We sat down with Zemlin in September to chat about the future of Linux and the problems presented by different distributions with different ideas of what makes Linux Linux.

How can Linux fragmentation be eliminated?

The great thing about Linux is that anyone can call any kernel-derived OS Linux. The tough thing about Linux is that anyone can call any kernel-derived OS Linux. It’s both a positive and negative at the same time; it’s very easy to argue both sides of that, both from the benefit side and the negative side. While that’s an easy thing to discuss, I think the challenge is finding a solid balance in terms of meeting user requirements: requirements to have consistency to participate in the benefit of network effects of having a very broad install base versus a very fragmented install base.

When you look at how to perform that balance, it’s important to look at the different segments of the marketplace where these users exist. The attributes of those markets are different and the requirements vary greatly between those segments.

In the consumer electronics world, you look at use-case-specific consumer electronic devices. In that case, fragmentation is most problematic for people implementing at the kernel level and device level. For a TV set or a simple toy camera, there isn’t necessarily a requirement for a large third-party ISV ecosystem. The requirement for those products is to provide a rich software experience. From the vendor side the requirement is to reduce overall cost. The way they do that is by sharing in the research, development and support of the core component there, which is the Linux kernel. As more consumer electronics companies increasingly use Linux, they’re beginning to realise that working with the main kernel community and getting support into the mainstream kernel provides the benefits they need in that market.

One example of a company that sees it’s important to participate in the upstream Linux is Microsoft. They participated to make sure support for their products goes upstream. In that world, fragmentation is being addressed.

The Linux Foundation, in that world, provides a role in educating consumer electronics vendors on how to participate in the Linux kernel development process and how to get their device supported in that world. I’ll be in Korea and Japan next week to educate people there on the benefits of this very participation. We’ve been swimmingly successful in bringing people into these efforts. The community has been excellent at getting that support.

In the mobile platform space or consumer electronics space, you need a third-party ISV ecosystem – mobile phones, set-top boxes, mobile internet tablets and so forth. This market requires a higher degree of consistency at a higher level of the stack. It does require the previous level’s consistencies. All the driver support and unified kernel development is needed to enable that particular component of the market.

When you look at that market, you have efforts such as the Google Android platform, the Palm Pre platform, the LiMo Foundation, the Moblin platform and a few others that are really in that space. Across each of those efforts, everyone by and large agrees upon the Linux kernel. At that layer that issue of fragmentation is being roughly solved. I think there’s always improvement that can be done there. I think that as the industry uses more and more Linux, they’re going to participate more in the upstream. You see this in the report of ‘Who’s Writing Linux?’. You see companies like Nokia moving up in that list, and that indicates a broader trend of participation with the user base. At the API level, what degree of consistency do they want to ensure benefits equivalent to their rivals in the closed source world, like the iPhone, or Windows Mobile, or the RIM BlackBerry application APIs.

Really in those efforts, you see fault lines across the various efforts, with LiMo probably being the least consistent. I don’t think they strive to have an application layer compatibility story, like Android’s Google Marketplace. The Palm Pre is a WebKit-based application API provided through Palm’s platform. Moblin has its consistency derived from the Linux Standard Base Project, which is hosted at the Linux Foundation and includes a common set of components, like GCC and X Windows. That market, in order for it to take off, requires a higher degree of consistency. Either a federated approach or a ‘go it on your own’ approach. I don’t know which one will shape up as the winner. I feel Moblin and Android will win with the federated approach. We’ll see if Palm is able to create a compelling ecosystem on their own. All those efforts are happening at the API level.

When did you first become interested in Linux?
That goes back to the 1990s, when getting set up on the internet was a big deal. And people who were interested in the internet were flocking to Linux as an internet-ready platform. There were various versions of Linux at the time. Debian caught my attention because it was organised along lines that scaled very nicely. Instead of there being some top-down hierarchy of priorities, they were organised from the bottom up. People could self-organise around projects they were interested in. I was interested in web servers, and there was no Debian package for a web server. So I packaged up Apache. It was a combination of really liking the social structure of Debian and the way it was organised, combined with a practical need to have a web server.

Today, Debian has a reputation of being a bit of a grumpy distribution. Do you think the Debian community has become more unapproachable since the 1990s?
It’s interesting how those reputations arrive and grow and become self-fulfilling. If you have a reputation for that long, you tend to attract people who are looking for that. I think there are more compelling parts of Debian. I think of Debian as having the basic mechanism in place to have that ideal mix of application-specific expertise and general system quality. It doesn’t always work out that way, and sometimes there are packages that aren’t maintained, but in principle at least, because of the way they’re organised, you should be able to get experts to maintain the package.

Many of the things that define Debian socially, really come through in the product. One of the great advantages of Debian is that they’ve refused to narrow the scope to one use-case. It’s a platform that’s very malleable. Those discussions often bear a lot of fruit in the generality of the system. Debian is one of those platforms that’s really easy to shape into something you didn’t know it could be beforehand. We have a more narrow focus in scope and time. Those approaches complement each other nicely. We’re in a line of conversation with Debian about the timing of our LTS [long-term support] release, which was not that far off from Debian’s stated next preferred release. That presents an opportunity to collaborate in a way that we had not before. It would be destructive to co-ordinate on a micro level, but there is an opportunity for macro collaboration. Initial signs have been encouraging. We’re looking through the details of that to see if we can make it worthwhile. If we do pull that off, I think it will be a really fantastic counter-example to people who think Debian and Ubuntu are at odds with one another. This would be systemic. We’d agree on core components for a release. If that works well between Debian and Ubuntu, I would hope we can reach out to Suse and Red Hat.

Have the various Linux distributions caused Linux itself to fragment as a platform?
It’s a really obvious concern that Linux is fragmented, and that that’s destructive. The nature of the fragmentation is very subtle. Look at Oracle’s Unbreakable Linux, for example. Literally, the stated goal is to be exactly the same as Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They took pains to say both things. On the one hand, we care about scalability. Unbreakable Linux is about as compatible with Red Hat as one could be: much closer than even a standard setting process could get you. In 99.9% of cases, exactly the same. And yet it represents a bridge too far for all sorts of applications. As much as we’d like to pretend it is, it’s not Red Hat. If you want to address fragmentation, don’t fool yourself that you can do it through standards.
Administrators and CIOs are just going to say “it’s different,” even if it’s exactly the same source code. How much more fragmented is a landscape that includes everything from Debian to Red Hat Enterprise Linux? There’s a fallacy that says we can write a document that will be a standard, and that will unfragment Linux. That’s not true. There a few brands with orthogonal things they’re recognised for. There are other spaces and other brands to fill. What Linux gives you is what other systems don’t have. Linux
gives you the ability to have lots of other innovations going on at the same time. That results in very rapid innovation on the edges of the system. The strongest ideas and the strongest brands survive.

Is the Linux Foundation helping to heal fragmentation wounds?

I think the Linux Foundation played a very important role in the ecosystem. They speak very powerfully for the whole Linux commercial community. They provide a single response to the moves and commentary that comes from proprietary players. They are also a neutral force for collaboration. They’ve led some significant efforts: big efforts around the automated testing of Linux. They organised a lot of conferences that bring major players from brands and interest groups together. I think they play an important role, but I think unfragmenting Linux by anything other than market forces is unlikely.

You can read the rest of this interview in the relaunch issue of Linux User & Developer on sale 30 July  WHSmiths, newsagents and supermarkets