Promoting Adoption
Interview – The Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin

As the Linux Foundation approaches its 20th anniversary, we sit down with Jim Zemlin to talk about how the nonprofit has expanded its mandate since its inception.
In 2000, the Linux Foundation arose from a merger of Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) and the Free Standards Group (FSG) to work towards standardizing Linux and promoting its adoption. Recently, we caught up with Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation's long serving executive director, following his keynote at the Open Source Summit Europe 2019 [1] in Lyon, France, to discuss how the nonprofit has matured through the years.
Linux Magazine: What does the Linux Foundation do? Not through its various groups, but what does the foundation itself do?
Jim Zemlin: So there's a few ways to think about the foundation where we are the infrastructure that allows these projects to be a good upstream for a lot of, in particular, commercial downstream usage. And that involves managing the intellectual property. So we have several attorneys on staff who manage the governance, the intellectual property of those projects.
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.

News
-
TuxCare Announces Support for AlmaLinux 9.2
Thanks to TuxCare, AlmaLinux 9.2 (and soon version 9.6) now enjoys years of ongoing patching and compliance.
-
Go-Based Botnet Attacking IoT Devices
Using an SSH credential brute-force attack, the Go-based PumaBot is exploiting IoT devices everywhere.
-
Plasma 6.5 Promises Better Memory Optimization
With the stable Plasma 6.4 on the horizon, KDE has a few new tricks up its sleeve for Plasma 6.5.
-
KaOS 2025.05 Officially Qt5 Free
If you're a fan of independent Linux distributions, the team behind KaOS is proud to announce the latest iteration that includes kernel 6.14 and KDE's Plasma 6.3.5.
-
Linux Kernel 6.15 Now Available
The latest Linux kernel is now available with several new features/improvements and the usual bug fixes.
-
Microsoft Makes Surprising WSL Announcement
In a move that might surprise some users, Microsoft has made Windows Subsystem for Linux open source.
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.