The Linux Foundation has become a kind of improper over the years. He has extended well beyond his roots while the administrator of the Linux kernel, emerging as an extensive umbrella dress for a thousand open source projects that cover cloud infrastructures, security, digital wallets, corporate research, Fintech, maps and more.
Last month, the Openinfra Foundation – better known for Openstack – became the last addition to its building, further cementing the status of Linux Foundation as “Foundation of foundations”.
The Linux Foundation emerged in 2007 from the merger of two non-profit non-profit focused on Linux: The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and Free Standards Group (FSG). With founding members such as IBM, Intel and Oracle, the Foundation’s Raison D’Etre was challenging the “closed” platforms of that time, which practically meant double on Linux in response to Windows domain.
“Computer science is entering a world dominated by two platforms: Linux and Windows,” said the executive director of the Linux Foundation, Jim Zemlin (pictured above). “While being managed under the same roof has given Windows a little consistency, Linux offers freedom of choice, customization and flexibility without forcing customers to block suppliers.”
A “approach to portfolio”
Zemlin has guided the charge at the Linux Foundation for about two decades, supervising its transition through technological waves such as mobile, cloud and – more recently – artificial intelligence. Its evolution from the centrality of Linux to coverage almost every technological corner reflects the way in which technology itself does not stop: it evolves and, above all, intersects.
“The technology goes up and down – We are no longer using iPod or floppy records,” Zemlin explained to Techcrunch in an interview during Kubecon in London last week. “What I understood at the beginning is that if the Linux Foundation were to become a lasting organ for the development of collective software, we had to be able to bet on many different forms of technology.”
This is what Zemlin defines a “portfolio approach”, similar to how a company diversifies so that it does not depend on the success of a single product. The combination of multiple critical projects under a single organization allows the foundations to benefit from specific vertical networking or self -level skills, for example, exploiting a wider copyright competence, patents, data privacy, IT security, marketing and organization of events.
Being able to group these resources among the projects is more important than ever, since companies compete for a growing series of regulations such as the EU AI ACT and the Cyber Resilience Act. Rather than every single project that must fight the good battle alone, they have the support of a foundation similar to the company supported by some of the largest companies in the world.
“At the Linux Foundation, we have specialists who work in the efforts of the vertical sector, but they are not lawyers or copyright experts or patent experts. They are also not experts in the management of large -scale events or in the training of developers,” said Zemlin. “And that’s why collective investment is important. We can create technology in an agile way through technical leadership in the project level, but in all projects they have a series of tools that create long -term sustainability for all of them collectively.”
The meeting of the Linux and Openinfra Foundation Foundation last month stressed this point. OpenSTACK, for the unboted, is a cloud computing platform based on open and open standards that emerged from a joint project between Rackspace and NASA in 2010. It went to a Foundation of the same name in 2012, before Rebranding as a Foundation Openinfra after passing its initial attention on OpenStack.
Zemlin met Jonathan Bryce, CEO of the Openinfra Foundation and one of the original OpenStack creators for years. The two foundations had already collaborated on shared initiatives, such as the White Paper of the open infrastructure project.
“We realized that together we could face some of the challenges that we are witnessing now to regulatory compliance, the risk of computer security, the legal challenges on the open source – because (open source) has become so pervasive,” said Zemlin.
For the Linux Foundation, the merger also brought an expert technical advantage in the fold, someone who had worked in 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 efforts of technical collaboration, who have knowledge and technical understandings, who understand how to grow an ecosystem, which know how to manage a company and have a level of humility that allows them to manage a super wide basis of people without inserting their ego,” said Zemlin. “That ability to lead through influence – there are not many people who have this ability.”
This portfolio approach extends beyond individual projects and bases and in a growing range of autonomous regional entities. The most recent flow was LF India, which was launched only a few months ago, but the Linux Foundation introduced a Japanese entity a few years ago, while in 2022 it launched a European branch to support a growing regulatory and digital sovereignty agenda through the block.
The Linux Foundation Europe, which hosts a handful of projects such as the Open Wallet Foundation, allows European members to collaborate with each other in isolation, also obtaining mutual adhesion for the wider global outfit of the Linux Foundation.
“There are moments in which, in the name of digital sovereignty, people want to collaborate with other EU organizations, or a government wants to sponsor or equip a particular effort and you only need to participate in EU organizations,” said Zemlin. “This (Linux Foundation Europe) allows us to put the needle on two things: they can work locally and have digital sovereignty, but they are not throwing out the global participation that makes open source so good.”
The open source factor
While the IA is unstoppably a serious change both for the technological kingdom and for society, it has also pushed the concept of “open source” in the mainstream arena in ways that traditional software does not have controversy in hot research.
Meta, for example, has positioned its llamm of models to the as open source, even if they are definitely not for most estimates. This also highlighted some of the challenges of the creation of a definition of ai open source of which everyone is satisfied, and now we are seeing artificial intelligence models with a spectrum of “opening” in terms of code access, set of data and commercial restrictions.
The Linux Foundation, already home to the LF AI & Data Foundation, which hosts about 75 projects, published the Model Openiss Framework (MOF) last year, designed to bring a more nuanced approach to the definition of Open Source. The open source initiative (OSI), administrators of the “open source definition”, used this framework in its definition of open source artificial intelligence.
“Most of the models do not have the necessary components for full understanding, auditing and reproducibility, and some models manufacturers use restrictive licenses, claiming that their models are” open source “”, wrote the authors of the Mof at the time.
And so the MOF serves a three -level classification system that evaluates the models on their “completeness and opening”, as regards the code, the data, the model parameters and the documentation.
It is basically a useful way to establish how much it really is “open” a model by evaluating which components are public and based on which licenses. Just because a model is not strictly “open source” of a definition does not mean that it is not open enough to help develop security tools that reduce hallucinations, for example – and Zemlin says that it is important to face these distinctions.
“I talk to many people in the AI community and is a much wider series of technology professionals (compared to traditional software engineering),” said Zemlin. “What they tell me is that they understand the importance of the open source meaning” something “and the importance of open source as a definition. Where they frustrate are a little too pedantic to each layer. What they want are predictability, transparency and understanding of what they are actually getting and using.”
The Chinese IA Darling Deepseek has also played an important role in the conversation to open source, emerging with performing and efficient open source open source models that have overturned the way in which the proprietary players in charge such as Opeeni have planned to release their models in the future.
But all this, according to Zemlin, is only another “moment” for open source.
“I think it is positive that people recognize how precious open source is in the development of any modern technology,” he said. “But the open source has these moments: Linux has been a time for open source, in which the open source community could produce a better operating system for cloud computing and Enterprise Computing and telecommunications compared to the largest owner software company in the world. The IA is experiencing that moment at this moment, and Deepseek is an important part of this.”
VC on the contrary
A quick peek through the series of projects of the Linux Foundation reveals two great categories: those he acquired, as with the Openinfra Foundation, and those he created from the inside, as he did with artists of the caliber of the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF).
While the acquisition of an existing project or foundation could be simpler, the start of a new project from scratch is probably more important, as it undertakes to satisfy an at least partially dissatisfied need. And this is where Zemlin says that there is “art and science” to be successful.
“Science is that you have to create value for developers in these communities that are creating the artifact, the open source code that everyone wants – that’s where all the value comes from,” said Zemlin. “Art is trying to understand where there is a new opportunity for Open Source to have a great impact on a sector.”
This is the reason why Zemlin refers to what the Linux Foundation is doing as something similar to an “reverse capitalist” approach. A VC is looking for adaptation to the product market and entrepreneurs with whom they want to work, all in the name of making money.
“On the other hand, we are looking for the fit of the” project market “: will this technology have a great impact on a specific sector? Can we bring together the right team of developers and leaders to make it? Is it large enough? Is it impact technology?” Zemlin said. “But instead of making a lot of money like a VC, let’s give everything away.”
But still his wide range of projects has materialized, the elephant cannot be ignored in the room: the Linux Foundation is no longer on Linux, and has not been for a long time. So should we ever expect a rebrand in something a little more prosaic, but including, like the Open Technology Foundation?
Do not hold back your breath.
“When I wear Linux Foundation Swag in a cafeteria, someone will often say:” I love Linux “or” I used Linux to college, “said Zemlin.” It’s a powerful domestic brand and it’s quite difficult to get away from that. Linux himself is such a positive idea, it is so emblematic of “open source” really of great impact and successful. “