OSDL strengthens links with developer community

By Matt Whipp

Posted on 22 Mar 2006 at 18:09

The Open Source Development Labs (OSDL) has set up a technical advisory board to beef up its communications with the developer community.

The OSDL, which employs the likes of Linus Torvalds and Andrew Morton, is a vendor-funded non-profit organisation pitched as a centre of gravity for Linux technology. The technical advisory board will help ensure the OSDL has a handle on what the developer community is focused on.

'It is important for OSDL to foster the Linux and open source development communities,' said Stuart Cohen, CEO of OSDL. 'We look to this new board to better help guide us in dedicating resources and people towards the most important issues and technical requirements facing the development community.'

A spokesperson told us that 'the formation of the technical advisory board is simply another step toward opening and increasing the lines of communication between the various constituencies that have made open source software so successful. This is ... about listening to what the community says it needs and providing the right vehicles for it to debate and make decisions that advance open source software.'

Contact between the technical advisory board and the OSDL will be ongoing. The board will meet monthly with OSDL management to discuss pressing community issues and twice a year will formally present findings to the OSDL board of Directors.

The new board comprises 10 leading Linux and open source software developers to be elected each year at the Linux Kernel Summit. Members serve two years, with half the board up for election each year.

The initial members are James Bottomley, OSDL board member, VP and CTO at SteelEye and Linux SCSI subsystem maintainer; Wim Coekaerts, director of Linux engineering at Oracle and Linux VM tester, Randy Dunlap, principal developer at Oracle and Linux kernel maintainer; Greg Kroah-Hartman, senior engineer, SuSE Labs, and Linux USB subsystem maintainer; Christoph Lameter, technical lead at Silicon Graphics, Inc.; Matt Mackall, Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) fellow and Linux Tiny maintainer; Theodore Ts'o, senior engineer at IBM and Linux filesystem maintainer; Arjan van de Ven, Linux kernel generalist; and Chris Wright, senior engineer at Red Hat and Linux security module maintainer.

With 20 per cent of the board from Oracle, and the OSDL having already said how keen it is for Oracle to join, this could be the first fruit of a closer relationship between the two.