NEWS HIGHLIGHTS

Top mobile and enterprise Linux executives lead keynote agenda: Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst to address enterprise Linux at 20 years and HP Chief Technology Officer Phil McKinney to discuss WebOS

Internet and society author Clay Shirky will illustrate how collaboration is shaping today’s global culture

LinuxCon Gala to mark official 20th Anniversary of Linux celebration and gather an unprecedented who’s who of Linux’ past, present and future

SAN FRANCISCO, April 14, 2011 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced its keynote speakers for North America’s premier annual conference LinuxCon, taking place in Vancouver, B.C. August 17-19, 2011.

The LinuxCon keynote lineup reflects major trends in the Linux market, from Linux in the enterprise and mobile computing, to its impact on today’s society and culture. The following keynote speakers have been confirmed:

* Mark Charlebois, Director of Open Source Strategy at Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC), will discuss the role of Linux in mobile development and innovation.

* Phil McKinney, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer at HP, will elaborate on the company’s WebOS platform strategy.

* Marten Mickos, Chief Executive Officer at Eucalyptus Systems and former CEO of MySQL, is a recognized enterprise software entrepreneur and investor with a keen understanding of Linux and open source software. Mickos will discuss the changing enterprise Linux landscape, specifically as it relates to cloud computing.

* Ubuntu’s Technical Architect Allison Randal will share how the vibrant Ubuntu community and development team are turning the vision for Linux into reality. Randal has more than 25 years of experience as a programmer and was the chief architect and lead developer on the open source project Parrot for many years.

* Clay Shirky is an award-winning author and expert on how technology shapes culture. Also a New York University Professor on Internet and Society whose recent book releases include “Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators” and “Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations,” Shirky will discuss how collaboration is impacting today’s culture.

* More than 10 years after being the first Linux company to go public and as we approach the 20-year anniversary of Linux, Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst will detail the biggest challenges we still face and what the next 20 years looks like.

The Call for Participation (CFP) deadline for LinuxCon is April 22, 2011. The Linux Foundation encourages all would-be speakers to submit a talk on technical, business or legal developments impacting Linux. To submit a proposal and be a part of this year’s historic event, please visit: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon/cfp. Additional details, speakers and sessions will be announced after all proposals have been received. The event this year will also be co-located with the KVM Forum, as well as other community mini-summits.

Registration is U.S. $500 through July 8, 2011. To register, please visit: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon/register.

LinuxCon Gala to Mark Formal Celebration of 20th Anniversary of Linux

The Linux Foundation today is also announcing additional details about the LinuxCon Gala, which will celebrate 20 years of Linux at the Commodore Ballroom in Vancouver.

The LinuxCon Gala will take place the evening of August 17, 2011 and will celebrate the 20th Anniversary of Linux with a “Roaring 20s” theme. The Linux Foundation is assembling an unprecedented lineup of key personalities to represent Linux’ past, present and future and will host a unique ceremony with special presentations of awards. The event will include a live band, casino, full dinner and open bar. Penguin suits (tuxedos) and “flapper” dresses will be available to rent onsite. For more information about the LinuxCon Gala, please visit: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon/social.

The winner of this year’s Linux Foundation Video Contest will also be revealed at LinuxCon. The contest is focused on the 20th Anniversary of Linux and is being judged by Linux creator Linus Torvalds. For more information and to submit your video, please visit: http://video.linux.com/20th-anniversary-video-contest. The Linux Foundation also produced the following “Story of Linux” video to help inspire submissions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ocq6_3-nEw.

The 20th Anniversary Video Booth, which is traveling to Linux Foundation events throughout year, will also be onsite for attendees to record personal messages to the rest of the community about Linux’ past, present and future.

LinuxCon, which has sold out every year since its debut, is the world’s leading conference addressing all matters Linux for the global business and technical communities. The LinuxCon schedule includes in-depth technical content for developers and operations personnel, as well as business and legal insight from the industry’s leaders. The networking, problem-solving and deal-making opportunities at LinuxCon are unmatched for those involved in enterprise, desktop or mobile Linux.

For more information, please visit the LinuxCon website.

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source development community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Linux conferences, including LinuxCon, and generating original Linux research and content that advances the understanding of the Linux platform. Its web properties, including Linux.com, reach approximately two million people per month. The organization also provides extensive Linux training opportunities that feature the Linux kernel community’s leading experts as instructors. Follow The Linux Foundation on Twitter.

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Trademarks: The Linux Foundation, Linux Standard Base , MeeGo and the Yocto Project are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Provider of semiconductor solutions will participate in Consumer Electronics workgroup, LinuxCon Japan

SAN FRANCISCO {Embedded Linux Conference} April 11, 2011 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced that Renesas Electronics Corporation is its newest member.

Renesas is a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, including microcontrollers (MCUs), systems-on-chip (SoC) solutions and a broad range of analog and power devices. The Japan-based company is aggressively investing in the areas of next-generation automotives, mobile phones, set-top boxes and other increasingly sophisticated electronics that are running Linux. For example, Renesas recently announced new SoCs for next-generation mobile phones and for dashboard-mounted car navigation systems, respectively, that support advanced human machine interfaces (HMI).

Renesas will contribute to Linux Foundation activities in the areas of embedded Linux and will participate in the Consumer Electronics (CE) working group and LinuxCon Japan (http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-japan), among other activities. The Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) merged with The Linux Foundation late last year to form the Consumer Electronics (CE) working group and align resources to more efficiently enable the adoption of Linux in the CE industry. For more information about CELF, please visit: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/celf.

“The Linux Foundation has brought together all the major embedded Linux stakeholders to collaborate on advancing the operating system for a variety of next-generation devices,” said Hiromi Watanabe, General Manager, SoC Software Platform Division, Renesas Electronics Corporation. “Renesas wants to be a part of this work and will contribute to the community as well as look for ways to help accelerate its own roadmap and strategy.”

“We are honored to welcome Renesas to The Linux Foundation,” said Amanda McPherson, vice president of marketing and developer programs. “Renesas brings to The Linux Foundation unique expertise about the Japanese and global markets for embedded Linux and we look forward to its contributions to the Linux community.”

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source development community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Linux conferences, including LinuxCon, and generating original Linux research and content that advances the understanding of the Linux platform. Its web properties, including Linux.com, reach approximately two million people per month. The organization also provides extensive Linux training opportunities that feature the Linux kernel community’s leading experts as instructors. Follow The Linux Foundation on Twitter.

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Trademarks: The Linux Foundation, Linux Standard Base, MeeGo and Yocto Project are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Annual video contest will celebrate 20 years of Linux, “Father of Linux” to choose the best among community favorites

SAN FRANCISCO {The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit} - April 6, 2011 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced its 2011 Video Contest: the 20th Anniversary of Linux. This is the third year The Linux Foundation has hosted the contest, which is an evolution of the original “We’re Linux” video competition.

This year’s contest will commemorate the 20th anniversary of Linux by seeking the best user-generated videos that celebrate Linux while demonstrating the impact of the operating system on computing, business and/or culture over the last 20 years and today.

The Linux Foundation today is also releasing an exclusive video to commemorate the 20th Anniversary of Linux and to inspire others to submit their own videos for the contest. “The Story of Linux” is available at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ocq6_3-nEw.

The creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, will choose the best video among the community favorites in this year’s competition. Torvalds first released Linux to the public in 1991 in what have become a series of famous postings (http://groups.google.com/group/comp.os.minix/msg/b813d52cbc5a044b?pli=1). Today he is a Fellow at The Linux Foundation and remains the ultimate authority on what new code is accepted in the standard Linux kernel.

This will be the first time that Torvalds has judged the entries. During the first two years of the contest, judging panels were used to review submissions and surface the ultimate winner. Previous judges have included notable industry personalities such as Larry Augustin, Andrew Morton and Tim O’Reily, among others.

The winner of this year’s 20th Anniversary of Linux Video Contest will win airfare, registration and hotel expenses to attend one of the following events of their choice: LinuxCon North America, LinuxCon Europe, SXSW 2012 or the LA Film Festival.

Video submissions must be received by 12:01 a.m. PDT on Saturday, July 2 2011. To increase your odds of winning and to submit your video, please visit The Linux Foundation’s video website for guidance on video submissions and the contest rules: http://video.linux.com/20th-anniversary-video-contest.

“The story of Linux has many chapters and there are literally no limits on how the operating system will innovate in the future. We’re looking forward to seeing how people choose to illustrate the impact Linux is having on computing and our society,” said Amanda McPherson, vice president of marketing and developer programs at The Linux Foundation. “This year’s winning video will help mark the 20th anniversary of Linux and the creator of the video will be especially honored as the winner chosen by none other than Linus.”

Previous Winners of The Linux Foundation’s Video Contest
In 2010, the contest invited participants to design an ad spot that would be worthy of running during the commercial-rich Super Bowl. The winning video put Linux in the context of the broader “green” movement, was titled “Go Linux” and was created by Anthony Stellato: http://video.linux.com/video/1696.

In its debut year, the video contest called on participants to consider the popular “I’m a Mac; I’m a PC” commercials and create their own videos to promote Linux. The concept was based on the idea that while Apple and Microsoft have billions of dollars in advertising budgets, Linux had the power of crowds. The winning video, by Amitay Tweeto and titled “What Does it Mean to Be Free,” was an inspirational piece that communicated the ideals of the open source operating system: http://video.linux.com/video/1106.

For more information on this year’s other 20th Anniversary of Linux celebrations, please visit: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/20th

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source development community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Linux conferences including LinuxCon, and generating original Linux research and content that advances the understanding of the Linux platform. Its web properties, including Linux.com, reach approximately two million people per month. The organization also provides extensive Linux training opportunities that feature the Linux kernel community’s leading experts as instructors. Follow The Linux Foundation on Twitter.

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Trademarks: The Linux Foundation, Linux Standard Base, MeeGo and Yocto Project are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.

New demands on high-availability computing are met with collaborative approach to hosting projects, prioritizing features

SAN FRANCISCO {Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit} April 6, 2011 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the formation of the High Availability (HA) Working Group.

The Working Group will bring together projects and stakeholders to collaboratively define the open source HA software stack and prioritize features based on input from developers, vendors, and customers. This work will inform support for today’s most sophisticated enterprises that are deploying Linux for mission-critical workloads.

The projects participating in this forum hosted by The Linux Foundation include corosync, DRBD, GFS2, hawk, Linux-HA, Linux Virtual Server, luci, OCFS2, Open Clustering Framework, and pacemaker. Leading enterprise Linux distributions, as well as Debian, Fedora, openSUSE, and Ubuntu, are already incorporating this technology and will contribute to the working group.

Novell’s Lars Marowsky-Bree will speak about HA and Linux at this week’s Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/collaboration-summit/hpc. Later this year, the HA Working Group members will be meeting at a mini-summit preceding the The Linux Foundation’s first annual LinuxCon Europe taking place in Prague October 24th-26th: http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon-europe.

“The Linux Foundation’s HA Working Group will bring together leading projects to collaborate on a common set of components and priorities to support this growing area in the enterprise,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “The collaborative development model can accelerate the advancement of key technologies and we expect the HA Working Group will do just that.”

HA refers to the availability of resources in a computer system or network and today is more critical than ever due to internal and external demands on infrastructure and applications. Ranging by industry, analysts have estimated that the cost of computing downtime is well over $1 million an hour. With an explosion of big data and new expectations from business customers and consumers about 24/7 connectivity, HA is taking center stage among the Linux community.

As the requirements on HA computing have increased, Linux has risen in its popularity among companies working on these systems. Achieving HA with cluster computing, cloud computing, and virtualization, among other strategies, can be maximized with Linux. Commodity-based hardware and software components make it easier and more affordable to deliver the high-performance, availability and scalability required of mission-critical Linux systems.

Supporting Quotes
LIN:BIT
“This new Working Group brings together the industry’s leading experts on high availability. Open source and open collaboration deliver excellent value to HA customers,” said Florian Haas, Partner Relationship Manager at LINBIT. “We are a very active player in the HA community, and we expect that the Working Group will become an important driver in this community.”

Novell
“Novell is committed to providing our customers with innovative open source clustering solutions for their mission-critical Linux workloads and we’re proud to co-found The Linux Foundation’s HA Working Group,” said Carlos Montero-Luque, vice president of Business and Product Management at Novell. “Collaboration among the open source HA community’s stakeholders will ensure the stability and shorten the development time of the latest advancements in this critical market for Linux.”

Oracle
“For over three decades Oracle software has supported some of the world’s biggest data centers and as a result, Oracle understands the importance of High Availability (HA),” said Wim Coekaerts, Oracle senior vice president Linux and Virtualization Engineering. “The Linux Foundation’s HA Working Group will consolidate Linux operating system efforts through contributions such as Oracle Cluster File System 2 (OCFS2) so that we continue to deliver on HA innovation in Linux.”

For more information about the HA Working Group, please visit: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/ha.

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source development community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Linux conferences, including LinuxCon, and generating original Linux research and content that advances the understanding of the Linux platform. Its web properties, including Linux.com, reach approximately two million people per month. The organization also provides extensive Linux training opportunities that feature the Linux kernel community’s leading experts as instructors. Follow The Linux Foundation on Twitter.

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Trademarks: The Linux Foundation, Linux Standard Base, MeeGo and Yocto Project are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.

Increased emphasis on high-end data reliability and security across industries inform latest Carrier Grade Linux requirements

SAN FRANCISCO {The Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit}, April 6, 2011 – The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the availability of Carrier Grade Linux Version 5.0 specification (CGL 5.0).

The Linux Foundation’s CGL workgroup has been collaborating on CGL gaps and requirements since 2002, and today’s release of CGL 5.0 covers several specification categories that include Availability, Clustering, Serviceability, Performance, Standards, Hardware, and Security. Also, a number of requirements have been dropped from the specification due to the mass adoption and ubiquity of CGL and its inclusion in the mainline Linux kernel, which allows these specifications to become consistent fixtures across distributions.

Since CGL was first introduced, the demands on data that is transferred among networks have significantly increased. Telecom carriers today must be able to handle a variety of content types, including streaming video, audio and packet traffic, for example, with no service interruptions.

The new requirements in CGL 5.0 intended to address this mature marketplace include:

• Increased focus on highly reliable, highly available filesystems including data protection, data portability, and backup and redundancy requirements.

• Carrier and data-center security gaps, including Role-based Access Control and data access auditing and tracing.

• Expanded diagnostics and debugging support including per-thread identifiers for debugging and a system black box.

• Online system tuning features allowing applications to determine and optimize themselves for the specific system architecture on which they are running.

To review the full CGL 5.0 specification, please visit: http://www.linuxfoundation.org/collaborate/workgroups/cgl.

There are six CGL distributions today from major Linux distributors including Novell, MontaVista and Wind River, all of which are registered as CGL-compliant. Registration for CGL 5.0 begins today.

“The Carrier Grade Linux workgroup is a testament to the power of collaboration to help advance Linux and accelerate its adoption,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. “CGL today is a recognized industry standard on which the world’s leading telecom companies rely to build their networks. The CGL workgroup members have significantly contributed to the adoption of Linux in the telecom market.”

Collaboration on CGL began in 2002 with the goal of making Linux deployable for telecom equipment manufacturers who were being faced with new service and bandwidth expectations while still needing to keep down investment costs. They also needed a more flexible approach that could take advantage of new technologies such as multi-core CPUs.

The Linux Foundation CGL workgroup members together established the CGL specification and contributed hundreds of source code contributions to Linux and other open source projects to enable the success of Linux in this space. A number of the workgroup member companies “open-sourced” proprietary technology to create projects to help minimize gaps in Linux, further enabling the adoption of Linux among telecom equipment and infrastructure manufactures.

The CGL workgroup has produced five major versions of specifications to define the required capabilities for Linux in carrier-grade telecom equipment since the original CGL 1.0 release in 2002. The result today is that Linux distribution suppliers are able to demonstrate that they meet the needs of telecommunications companies by disclosing how their products address the requirements.

Industry Comments
Huawei
“Linux today is a preferable foundation on which to build telecom equipment thanks to the collaboration between the community members and companies who have participated in the Carrier Grade Linux workgroup,” said Bruno Zhang, Director of Central Base Platform, Huawei Technologies Co.,Ltd. “CGL 5.0 will certainly reaffirm that position for Linux.”

MontaVista
“The CGL specification is a shining example of a highly successful standard in Linux and open source which has resulted in many carrier class features becoming a standard part of upstream Linux-based projects,” said Dan Cauchy, VP of marketing and business development at MontaVista Software. “The release of CGL 5.0 represents an important evolution of requirements. MontaVista has been delivering CGL compliant products for many years and we look forward to submitting our compliance registration.”
Novell
“The widespread adoption of Carrier Grade Linux reflects the ability of Linux to deliver on reliability, high-availability and security for telecom customers,” said Holger Dyroff, vice president, Business Development, Open Platform Solutions at Novell. “For the past eight years Novell has focused on Carrier Grade Linux, with several product generations of SUSE Linux Enterprise being CGL certified. We are pleased to adopt the CGL 5.0 standard as it represents the strength of Linux specifications and will help to drive the growth of Linux in the telecommunications market.”

NTT
“Carrier Grade Linux has become a technology inevitable for carrier networks and the telecommunications industry. CGL 5.0 addresses the needs of the entire telecommunications ecosystem, and reaffirms the strength of Linux to address evolving requirements in a fast-moving environment,” said Hisashi Komura, vice president, general manager, NTT Network Service Systems Laboratories, NTT Corporation.

Wind River
“Wind River has been CGL compliant since our very first Linux distribution and CGL continues to be a very relevant and important component of our Linux solution. There is an especially strong and ongoing demand for CGL compliance from our networking customers, across all architectures and geographies,” says Glenn Seiler, senior director of Linux Product Management at Wind River. “This latest version of the CGL specification encompasses input from all over the industry including the SCOPE Alliance, network equipment providers and platform providers.”

ZTE
“Carrier Grade Linux is recognized standard for next-generation communications networks and infrastructure,” said Mr. Zhongweidong, Open Source CTO, ZTE Corporation. “The Linux Foundation’s CGL workgroup is an example of how our collaborative development can accelerate technology and have an impact on an entire industry.”

About The Linux Foundation
The Linux Foundation is a nonprofit consortium dedicated to fostering the growth of Linux. Founded in 2007, the organization sponsors the work of Linux creator Linus Torvalds and promotes, protects and advances the Linux operating system by marshaling the resources of its members and the open source development community. The Linux Foundation provides a neutral forum for collaboration and education by hosting Linux conferences, including LinuxCon, and generating original Linux research and content that advances the understanding of the Linux platform. Its web properties, including Linux.com, reach approximately two million people per month. The organization also provides extensive Linux training opportunities that feature the Linux kernel community’s leading experts as instructors. Follow The Linux Foundation on Twitter.

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Trademarks: The Linux Foundation, Linux Standard Base, MeeGo and Yocto Project are trademarks of The Linux Foundation. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds.