The Linux Foundation has become something wrong over the years. It is extended beyond its roots as the Linux kernel administrator, emerging as a widespread umbrella dress for a thousand open -sourced projects that includes cloud infrastructure, security, digital wallets, enterprise search, fintech, maps, and more.
Last month, the OPENENDFRA Foundation – best known to Openstack – became the latest sustainable addition, further cementing the status of Linux Foundation as a “foundation foundation”.
The Linux Foundation appeared in 2007 by the merger of two non-concentrated Linux profits: Open Source Development Laboratories (OSDL) and Free Standards (FSG) group. With founding members like IBM, Intel and Oracle, Raison d’être of the Foundation was challenging the “closed” platforms of that time – which essentially meant the doubling of Linux in response to the rule of Windows.
“The calculation is entering a world dominated by two platforms: Linux and Windows,” said Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin (photo above), said at the time. “While managing under one roof has given the windows some durability, Linux offers freedom of choice, personalization and flexibility without forcing customers to block sellers.”
A “portfolio access”
Zemlin has led the charge at the Linux Foundation for about two decades, overseeing its transition through technological waves such as mobile, cloud and – lately – artificial intelligence. Its evolution from the Linux center to cover almost every technological nook is reflecting how technology itself does not stand in itself-it evolves and, most importantly, it crosses.
“Technology goes up and down – we are no longer using iPods or floppy disks,” Zemlin explained to Techcrunch in an interview during London last week. “What I realized early was that if the Linux Foundation became a stable organ for collective software development, we had to be able to concrete for many different forms of technology.”
This is what Zemlin refers to as a “portfolio approach”, similar to how a company diversifies, so it does not depend on the success of a single product. The combination of numerous critical projects under a single organization enables the Foundation to benefit from specific vertical expertise on the network or Linux of the automotive scale, for example, while pressing broader copyright expertise, patents, data intimacy, online security, marketing and events.
Being able to unite such resources through projects is more important than ever, as businesses fight a set of growing rules such as the EU Act and the Act of Internet Resistance. Instead of each individual project that should only fight the good war, they have the support of a corporate foundation supported by some of the largest companies in the world.
“In the Linux Foundation, we have specialists working in the vertical efforts of the industry, but they are not lawyers or copyright experts or patent experts. They are also not experts in large -scale events, or developers’ training,” Zemlin said. “And that is why collective investment is important. We can create technology in an agile way through technical leadership at the project level, but then in all projects have a set of tools that create long -term sustainability for all of them collectively.”
The Linux Foundation meeting and the OPENENFRA Foundation last month underlined this point. Openstack, for the non-initiating, is an open source, a standard opening-based cloud platform that emerged from a joint project between Rackspace and NASA in 2010. It switched to an eponymous foundation in 2012, before being renovated as the OPENNFRA Foundation as it exceeded its original focus on Openstack.
Zemlin was known by Jonathan Bryce, CEO of the Openfra Foundation and one of the original Openstack creators for years. Both foundations had already collaborated on joint initiatives, such as Whiteper of the Open Infrastructure Project.
“We realized that together we can deal with some of the challenges we are now seeing about regulatory compliance, the risk of online security, the legal challenges over the open source – because it has become so widespread,” Zemlin said.
For the Linux Foundation, the Union also brought an experienced technical lead, someone who had worked in the industry and built a product used by some of the largest organizations in the world.
“It is very difficult to hire people to guide the technical efforts of cooperation, who have technical knowledge and understanding, who understand how to grow an ecosystem who know how to run a business, and have a level of humility that allows them to manage a super -wide basis without introducing their ego,” said Zemlin. “This ability to guide through influence – there aren’t many people who have that ability.”
This portfolio approach extends beyond individual projects and foundations, and to a growing group of independent regional entities. The latest violation was LF India, which began just months ago, but the Linux Foundation introduced a Japanese entity a few years ago, while in 2022 it launched a European branch to support an increased regulatory and digital agenda of sovereignty across the bloc.
The Linux Europe Foundation, which houses a small part of projects such as the Open Wallet Foundation, allows European members to cooperate with each other in isolation, also gaining mutual membership for the wider Linux Global Outfit Foundation.
“There are times when, in the name of digital sovereignty, people want to cooperate with other EU organizations, or a government wants to sponsor or provide a special effort, and you should only have EU organizations to participate in it,” Zemlin said. “This (Linux Foundation Europe) allows us to start the needle in two things – they can work in the country and have digital sovereignty, but they are not throwing the global participation that makes the source so good.”
Factor he with open source he
While it is undoubtedly a big difference for both the field of technology and for society, it has also pushed the concept of “open source” in the main arena in ways that traditional software has no controversy in hot pursuit.
Meta, for example, has positioned its Llama brand of the models of it as an open source, although they are firmly not by most ratings. This has also highlighted some of the challenges of creating an open -source definition with which everyone is happy, and we are now seeing models of a “opening” spectrum in terms of access to code, data and trade restrictions.
Linux Foundation, already the House of the LF AI & Data Foundation, which houses about 75 projects, last year published model model frame space (MOF), created to bring a more nuanced approach to the open source definition. Open Source Initiative (OSI), administrators of “open source definition”, used this framework in its open source definition.
“Most models lack the ingredients needed for understanding, auditing and reproductiveness, and some model manufacturers use restrictive licenses while claiming their models are ‘open source’,” MOF Paper authors at the time.
And so, MOF serves a three -level classification system that evaluates the models in their “whole and opening” with respect to code, data, model parameters and documentation.
Basically it is a useful way to determine how “open” is a model really by assessing which ingredients are public, and under what licenses. Just that a model is not strictly “open source” by a definition does not mean that it is not open enough to help develop safety remedies that reduce hallucinations, for example – and Zemlin says it is important to address these differences.
“I talk to a lot of people in the community of him, and is a much wider group of technology practitioners (compared to traditional software engineering),” Zemlin said. “What they tell me is that they understand the importance of the open source which means” something “and the importance of open source as a definition. Where they are irritated is to be more or less pedantic in every layer. What they want are predictability and transparency and understanding what they are actually taking and using.”
Chinese Darling Deepseek has also played a large part in the open source conversation, coming up with performance, efficiently open source models that increased how owner players in office such as Openai plan to leave their models in the future.
But all this, according to Zemlin, is just another “moment” for the open source.
“I think it’s good for people to know how open source is in the development of any modern technology,” he said. “But the open source has these moments – Linux was a moment for the open source, where the open -source community could produce a better operating system for Cloud computing and enterprise and telecommunications computing than the largest owner’s software company in the world. He is having that moment now, and Deepseek is a large part of it.”
Vc in reverse
A quick look at the Linux Foundation project group reveals two broad categories: those it has acquired, both with the Openfra Foundation, and those it has created internally, as it has done with the likes of the Open Source Safety Foundation.
While getting an existing project or foundation may be easier, starting a new project from scratch is probably more important, as it tries to meet a need that at least partially unfulfilled. And this is where Zemlin says there is an “art and science” to succeed.
“The science is that you have to create value for developers in these communities that are creating the object, the open source code that everyone wants – here comes the whole value,” Zemlin said. “Art is trying to understand where there is a new opportunity for open source to have a huge impact on an industry.”
That is why Zemlin refers to what the Linux Foundation is doing as something similar to a “capitalist reverse venture” approach. A VC requires the adaptation of the product market, and entrepreneurs with whom they want to work-all in the name of earning money.
“On the contrary, we seek to adapt to the” Market Project “-will this great technology have in a specific industry? Can we bring together the right team of developers and leaders to make it happen? Is that market big? Is technology influential?” Said Zemlin. “But instead of earning a cash tone like a QV, we give it all.”
But, however, a wide range of its projects was implemented, there is no ignorance of the elephant in the room: the Linux Foundation no longer has everything for Linux, and has not been for a long time. So, should we ever expect a rebrand in something a little more prosaic, but inclusive – like the Open Technology Foundation?
Don’t hold your breath.
“When I wear the Linux foundation in a cafe, someone often means,” I love Linux “or” I used Linux in college “,” said Zemlin. “It’s a powerful homemade brand and it’s very difficult to get away from this. Linux itself is such a positive idea, it’s so emblematic of” open source “really influential and successful.
