Ask a penguin to see which way Linux wind blows

By China Martens, IDG News Service, 08/14/07

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The nonprofit Linux Foundation has unveiled the Linux Weather Forecast, a Web site aimed at giving people a better sense of the status of specific Linux kernel projects.

The Foundation created the forecast site by teaming up with Jonathan Corbet, a Linux kernel developer and writer, who's also executive editor of the LWN.net Linux and free software news site.

The forecast, which will be officially announced on Wednesday, is already live and tracks work in the Linux developer community likely to be included in the operating system's kernel and in major distributions of the open-source software, or both.

The Linux Foundation was formed earlier this year through the merger of the two leading evangelizers of the operating system, the Open Source Development Labs and the Free Standards Group consortiums. The organization has two main tasks, according to Jim Zemlin, executive director at the Linux Foundation, to build on Linux's existing strengths and to buttress its weaknesses. "Now that everyone gets that open source works and it's a mainstream technology, how do we up our game?," he said.

As Linux looks to compete more and more on equal terms with proprietary operating systems like Microsoft's Windows, the open-source software has to have equally rich support mechanisms in place. Already, the Foundation offers the Linux Developer Network, a resource site for programmers, similar in thinking to the Microsoft Developer Network.

The creation of the Linux Weather Forecast is a way to improve on one of the operating system's key strengths -- its open-source development model, which allows many people to both contribute to and refine Linux, leading to rapid development, Zemlin said. He estimates that every day developers add 2,300 lines of code to the Linux kernel. On average, a new version of the Linux kernel appears every three months, while fresh desktop distributions of the operating system debut every six months and enterprise distributions become available every 18 months.

The IDG News Service is a Network World affiliate.

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