How are things going for you at OSDL?

Very well. I've been there about 18 months. By almost any market share measure, Linux gets double-digit growth quarter-on-quarter and has tremendous success. That part's good.

When I got here we had 23 member companies. We've about 60 now, and will probably finish the year with 65-70 and reach 100 next year. Lots of people are interested in participating in what we're doing. Our membership plans are $10,000, $100,000, $500,000 and $1m. Our budgets [and] reserves are going up.

We were [also] primarily technical. But as Linux moves more mainstream, we're probably equally technical, marketing, business and legal issues. We're also broader, [covering] Linux and both open source and proprietary Linux-based applications that run on top, because that's the reality of the software portfolio out there.

We'd like to see more people participate, more workgroups, and we'd like to see more Europeans involved [as] we're mostly US and Asia. We've offices in Tokyo and, just opened, in Beijing. We've a single UK-based employee in Europe, but we're [planning to] open a new office in Europe in the next few months.

Where's that likely to be?

Three candidates: Brussels, because of the EU, the UK and Germany, which is doing the most with Linux. We've got a little more work before we figure that out.

We've a European customer advisory council of about 20 participating Global 2000 companies. We've similar councils in the US and Japan [and] we'll have one in South America starting around [January 2005].

What are the OSDL's main successes to date?

Technical: Obviously with [Linux creator] Linus Torvalds and [kernel maintainer] Andrew Morton we're doing our fair share of code development, and the subsystem maintenance and performance testing work we do is significant.

Business: some thought leadership we've been doing has been very helpful.

Legal: the white papers, the legal defence fund, education, ideas around a prior art repository and work we're doing around trademark, patents, licensing and copyright is all very important [although] we haven't come out very much on that [yet]. Then there's our work in the telecoms market [with carrier grade Linux].

What are joining companies really looking for?

In most cases they're focused on data centre, carrier grade or desktop [Linux] and [identifying] the technical and market inhibitors to knock out for acceleration to take place. In the US and Europe people want to participate in those workgroups.

Some Asian companies join because the open source development community is much smaller for us to bridge between their country or organisation and the rest of the world's development communities.

I'm sure there are some who think that if they join the OSDL they're going to talk to Linus and Andrew all the time, which doesn't really happen, and some that just do it for networking with other companies and the inexpensive market research.

Are these inhibitors being tackled?

The major ones are. There's a lot of kernel things that [version] 2.6 solved. Performance on 8/16/32-way is dramatically different. Some technical things are dramatically better in 2.6 than 2.4.

There are more issues around the ecosystem - ISV porting, application certification, binary compatibility amongst distributions - the programs and the libraries that make up a new, broader definition of Linux.

What are your priorities now?

Probably number one is ISV [independent software vendor] software adoption and the ability to run software across multiple distributions with a single image.

It's very important to make sure that the value proposition is strong for users and ISVs, and that Linux doesn't go the way of Unix where there's a forking of the operating system at distribution level.

I heard of a user with Red Hat and Novell SuSE Linux, because one critical application was only certified for Red Hat with other key software only available on SuSE. Is that an example?

That's not as big a problem to me as let's say Oracle is the database behind those applications. If Oracle had to support different versions on SuSE and Red Hat, so the customer had to support and pay for two versions, the value proposition starts to deteriorate. That's a bigger problem.

[From your example] my guess is that the application provider said the level of support the user wanted had to come from a single distribution. If it were Oracle, we're finding they don't care which distribution because they'll hold [Oracle] accountable for the results.

Is getting end users and resellers on board a priority?

It's important that they participate. We've got 60 to 70 companies in Europe, 90 per cent of which are vendors, so I'd like to get a little more in balance with users. But we have three councils with people participating [from] 55 different companies. They provide the business feedback we need to balance the vendors' viewpoint. When we got those up and running I felt a lot better about the balance.

What we're about is data. The money's nice, but not critical. We need their input, their involvement. We're getting a lot of value from [these councils].

We have data centre, carrier grade and desktop workgroups, and special interest groups around networks, security, storage and the like. We use the councils to provide feedback and validation on things we're thinking about in those workgroups. So we present our latest results, thinking and maybe specifications and prioritisation. We put their feedback into our working groups, which helps us define projects.

Are there any specific new projects?