Ask The Linux Foundation's Executive Director Jim Zemlin What You Will 58
In addition to sponsoring the work of Linus Torvalds, The Linux Foundation supports and promotes a wide variety of resources and services for Linux. Their recently released 2014 Linux Jobs Report surveyed more than 1,000 managers and corporations, finding in part, that the demand for "Linux Professionals" was up 70% from last year. Jim Zemlin is the Executive Director of the Linux Foundation and he has agreed to answer any questions that you have about the report and the state of Linux in general. As usual, ask as many as you'd like, but please, one question per post.
Keeping the eco system coherent (Score:5, Insightful)
Is the Linux foundation doing anything to insure the various distributions each incorporate the improvements done in the various distributions?
I'm worried about the long term branching side effects. We have Debian, Red Hat, Oracle, and others adding functions and improvements.
What is being done to insure both hybrid vigor and "re-mainlining" of promising branches?
Driver support (Score:2, Insightful)
One thing I'm curious about - is the Linux Foundation keeping a tab to ensure that driver support is there for as many devices as possible under Linux, so that the chances of something not working under Linux is minimal? This is obviously not an issue w/ Windows, since device manufacturers target it for their devices, but one can easily see devices not being recognized by Linux. Sometimes, the recognition may vary from one version to other, or distro to distro. What, if anything, does the Linux foundation do to ensure maximum coverage, regardless of version or device?
A related thing I was interested in knowing - usually, there are version mismatches if one tries to install a certain version of ALSA on a certain version of Linux. Can't sound be made an integral part of the Linux kernel so that one doesn't need to install ALSA or Pulse Audio or other such workarounds?