Despite being home to Linux creator Linus Torvalds, Linux kernel maintainer Andrew Morton, and Samba creator Andrew Tridgell, the Beaverton, Oregon-based OSDL is still predominantly a vendor-led organization.
It was set up in 2000 by the likes of IBM Corp, Hewlett-Packard Co, CA Inc, Intel Corp, and NEC Corp to promote the use of Linux and has subsequently become home to the Data Center, Carrier Grade, and Desktop Linux working groups, as well as the Mobile Linux initiative.
The organization has added more Linux user organizations to its member roster in recent years, and is now opening up more to the Linux developer community with the formation of its Technical Advisory Board, which is being set up to advise OSDL on technical requirements and issues important to the greater development community.
TAB members will be elected by Linux Kernel Summit attendees each July, with board members will serving two years, and half of the ten-member board up for election each year. The TAB will also have representation on the OSDL board of directors following the recent election of James Bottomley to the OSDL board.
Bottomley is vice president and chief technology officer at high availability software vendor SteelEye Inc and also the Linux SCSI subsystem maintainer, and will serve on the initial TAB alongside Wim Coekaerts, director of Linux engineering at Oracle and Linux virtual machine tester, and Randy Dunlap, principal developer at Oracle and Linux kernel maintainer.
Other TAB members are Greg Kroah-Hartman, senior engineer at Novell Inc’s SUSE Labs, and Linux USB subsystem maintainer, Christoph Lameter, technical lead at Silicon Graphics Inc, and Matt Mackall, Consumer Electronics Linux Forum (CELF) fellow and Linux Tiny maintainer.
Also serving on the inaugural TAB are Ted Ts’o, senior engineer at IBM Corp and Linux filesystem maintainer. Arjan van de Ven, Linux kernel developer, and Chris Wright, senior engineer at Red Hat Inc and Linux security module maintainer.
The TAB will meet monthly and initially focus on nurturing the Linux and open source development communities by improving communication between the community and vendors, increasing the participation of vendors in open source projects, and formalizing relationships across OSDL constituencies, according to the OSDL.