OStatic

With all that goes on at conferences, it would seem that a white paper presentation would be, invariably, a pretty dry event -- with the document itself being even drier. While there are many topics in the Linux Foundation-sponsored IDC white paper, The Opportunity for Linux in a New Economy (linked here as a PDF), and one might choose to quickly skim the research, data and projections, this report is really well worth taking a close look through.

Overall, IDC is a projecting a rosy future for Linux-related growth in the enterprise, with a compound annual growth rate of 23.6% for the 2008-2013 period. The overall market is projected to experience a 5% growth rate over that same time frame.

One of the first announcements rolling out of the Linux Collaboration Summit in San Francisco this morning is the Linux Foundation's addition of the openSUSE Build Service (OBS) to its Linux Developer Network. The Foundation plans to provide an interface to the OBS via the LDN site to aid developers wishing to package their projects for all of the major Linux distributions.

This is a significant step forward for the OBS, the development community, and, ultimately, Linux users of all walks of life, using just about any distribution on nearly every chip architecture.

Sometimes, I'll come across a story that seems minor, and once I start really thinking about it, dozens of shiny shards of complexity make their presence known. Today's announcement coming from Intel and the Linux Foundation isn't one of those stories. It's a major announcement -- Intel is handing its Moblin Project over to the Linux Foundation for hosting, development, and support. It's a big deal at face value -- and once fully considered, it just keeps growing.

Moblin is one of the most advanced -- and open -- mobile platforms. It's rooted firmly in Linux, and can be configured to run in many iterations on a wide variety of mobile devices, ranging from netbooks to in-car information and entertainment systems. So why is Intel turning over the reins to the Linux Foundation? As the Linux Foundation's Executive Director, Jim Zemlin, tells the New York Times, Moblin is working out to be a strategic platform as much as it is a mobile one.