The Linux Foundation

Linux's Broadening Foundation

Doc Searls — Thu, 06 Jun 2019 11:30:00 +0000

It's time to embrace 5G, starting with the Edge in our homes and hands.

In June 1997, David Isenberg, then of AT&T Labs Research, wrote a landmark paper titled "Rise of the Stupid Network". You can still find it here. The paper argued against phone companies' intent to make their own systems smarter. He said the internet, which already was subsuming all the world's phone and cable TV company networks, was succeeding not by being smart, but by being stupid. By that, he meant the internet "was built for intelligence at the end-user's device, not in the network".

In a stupid network, he wrote, "the data is boss, bits are essentially free, and there is no assumption that the data is of a single data rate or data type." That approach worked because the internet's base protocol, TCP/IP, was as general-purpose as can be. It supported every possible use by not caring about any particular use or purpose. That meant it didn't care about data rates or types, billing or other selfish concerns of the smaller specialized networks it harnessed. Instead, the internet's only concern was connecting end points for any of those end points' purposes, over any intermediary networks, including all those specialized ones, without prejudice. That lack of prejudice is what we later called neutrality.

The academic term for the internet's content- and purpose-neutral design is end-to-end. That design was informed by "End-to-End Arguments in System Design", a paper by Jerome Saltzer, David P. Reed and David D. Clark, published in 1980. In 2003, David Weinberger and I later cited both papers in "World of Ends: What the Internet Is and How to Stop Mistaking It for Something Else". In it, we explained:

When Craig Burton describes the Net's stupid architecture as a hollow sphere comprised entirely of ends, he's painting a picture that gets at what's most remarkable about the Internet's architecture: Take the value out of the center and you enable an insane flowering of value among the connected end points. Because, of course, when every end is connected, each to each and each to all, the ends aren't endpoints at all.

And what do we ends do? Anything that can be done by anyone who wants to move bits around.

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Why We Need Our Nonprofits

Doc Searls — Tue, 26 Mar 2019 12:00:00 +0000

by Doc Searls

A confession: before I heard Bradley Kuhn's talk at Freenode.live last November, I didn't know that HDMI was a proprietary interface. I just assumed that HDMI was like VGA, USB and dozens of other standardized ways to connect the jacks on two devices through a cable with plugs at both ends. I did assume a cabal of companies was behind HDMI, but I didn't know that only "adopters" could make HDMI stuff, and that being an adopter required paying serious money to something called HDMI Licensing LLC.

I also didn't know there was a FLOSS story behind VGA. "We spent probably two decades getting VGA just to work everywhere", Bradley explained. And now, even though most projectors still respect VGA, "the presumed setup" for a presenter, he said, "is a proprietary HDMI connector". He didn't like that and now I don't either.

Could we have prevented HDMI from becoming what it is? Can we prevent the all-proprietary future of hardware and interfaces from coming to pass? This is a huge question, since the whole tech world seems to be moving in an embedded direction, with Linux and FLOSS goods (and values) buried deep inside proprietary and closed devices.

Bradley works with the Software Freedom Conservancy, a non-profit home and organizational infrastructure for FLOSS projects. It's an essential service. Git is there. So are Boost, Busybox, Samba, Squeak, Sugar, Wine and many others.

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Lights, Camera, Open Source: Hollywood Turns to Linux for New Code Sharing Initiative

Gabriel Avner — Fri, 14 Sep 2018 13:08:08 +0000

by Gabriel Avner

Software has permeated all industries, bringing us technologies to help create fantastic products and even works of art.No longer confined to sectors whose products are software-focused, everyone from the automotive to the medical industries are writing their own code to meet their needs, some of which may surprise you.

In looking to code smarter, faster and more efficiently, developers across the globe and industries are turning to open-source components that allow them to add powerful features to their work without having to write everything from scratch themselves. One of the latest groups to embrace the Open Source movement is the entertainment industry.

Similar to many other initiatives that have come together in recent years to support the sharing of code between companies, a number of key players under the umbrella of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) have teamed up with The Linux Foundation to establish the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF). Members include companies like Disney, Google, Dreamworks, Epic Games and Intel, just to name a few.

Facing the Reality of Open Source

The drive for these entertainment industry players to team up with The Linux Foundation comes after a two-year study by the AMPAS’ Science and Technology Council into how the sector was using open source. Their survey found that some 84% were using open source in their work, specifically in the fields of animation and visual effects.

However, even as these actors understood the benefits of using open-source projects that were being developed by others, maintaining an ecosystem of sharing software between often competing interests proved to be a challenge. Issues of governance, licensing, multiple versions of libraries and siloed development by individual companies proved to be significant pain points.

According to information available from the ASWF, they are providing much of the infrastructure for the projects, including running their CI server on Jenkins where code can go through the build, test and eventually release for use by the members. Using a centralized system, developers at the various member companies can upload their code to the ASWF repository and CI where it is then available to the other teams.

They note that along with support for Linux, their CI infrastructure will offer service for Windows and Mac desktops and servers, an important requirement in an industry with a high level of Apple usage.

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