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.
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