October 15th, 2008
2008 has been very very good for the Linux Foundation
While many vendors have struggled this has been a very very good year for the Linux Foundation.
It continues today with the launch of the first beta for Linux Standard Base 4.0, and word that its Free and Open Source governance workgroup, FOSSBazaar, has doubled its membership this year.
While it would be fun to attribute all this to the brilliant and wise leadership of executive director (and blogger)Â Jim Zemlin, something deeper is at work.
The something is buried in the boilerplate of the FOSSBazaar release:
FOSSBazaar is the Linux and open source community’s approach to sustaining FOSS as a dependable choice for IT departments.
We are used to thinking of the software industry as representing vendors and, at ZDNet, vendors pay the bills.
But that has always been just a part of it. IT departments are increasingly software-writing shops. What vendors call customers are, increasingly, collaborators.
Smaller and smaller businesses are bringing programmers on-staff to adapt and maintain their growing infrastructures. Even the smallest businesses can do a little DIY when things go wrong. Open source accelerates the trend.
If you’re looking for work the industry model is more like that of public relations. You can work inside or outside, at an agency or for a company. You can even freelance. The work keeps growing but the “industry” seems stagnant.
That may be a poor analogy but I think you get the idea. Vendors are just the tip of the industry iceberg. And penguins like icebergs.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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