In his role as executive director of the Linux Foundation, Jim Zemlin is part legal guardian, part keeper of the flame. The non-profit foundation he runs is charged with promoting the growth of Linux, drafting new industry standards for its use, and defending it against legal challenges.

He lives and breathes free software. He wants Linux to win. He also signs Linus Torvalds’ paychecks.

Zemlin is in Boston this week for LinuxCon, the Linux Foundation’s annual technical conference. Tuesday, the foundation announced the Open Compliance Program, an initiative offering training, legal consultation and software tools to companies interested in jumping into open source.

The recent explosion of interest around Android has motivated scores of companies to fast-track their own Linux-powered devices. But free software licensing can be a legal minefield for newbies of all sizes.

“We’d rather have companies come to us than try to go it alone,” Zemlin says. “Or worse, like do nothing and get sued later.”

We sat down with Zemlin to get the details of the Open Compliance Program, and to pick his brain about where Linux is heading. Also, we discuss the state of app stores, the importance of HTML5, and why Apple is the best thing to happen to Linux in years.

Wired.com: Tell us about this new compliance program.

Jim Zemlin: In the last year, there’s been this huge increase in device makers using Linux and open source in a much more high volume, high stakes way with more sophisticated supply chains. To make a Nexus One, you’ve got a chipset vendor, a radio supplier, a middleware supplier, a network operator — all these different people passing code around and shipping stuff.

The collaborative technical development side of open source, people pretty much have it down. But lagging behind that technical adoption are all the legal and business things required to do this type of development. License compliance is a huge issue right now. It’s not intentional, it’s usually the result of laziness or lack of knowledge. And it happens a lot.

Wired.com: Has this lack of knowledge or FUD about Linux licensing slowed the adoption of new projects like Android and MeeGo?

Zemlin: Yes, there are increases in both cost and time. All these guys — networks, phone makers — they have to put new legal processes in place. The spend too much time and money doing that. I have people on staff at the Linux Foundation who can teach these companies in two days what it would take them a year to learn on their own.

Wired.com: Is the smartphone Linux’s biggest hope right now? Sure, people use ATMs or they check their voicemail every day, and those are usually Linux systems. But an Android phone is something people carry with them in their pocket and fiddle with fifty times a day. It’s a big shift.

Zemlin: It’s so much bigger than that. Three or four years from now, Linux is not going to be just an operating system you use on your laptop or your phone. It’s going to become the fabric of computing.

Right now there are two billion or so people on the internet. In a few years, there will be two trillion connected devices. (Points around the room) Those light bulbs, those stereo speakers, the credit card machine, the power meters on the wall, the traffic lights outside, the security cameras — all of those components are going to be connected.

Embedded systems, mobile devices, storage, supercomputing — they’re all running Linux. There’s never been a platform that’s been able to adapt to all these different uses as well as Linux.

We don’t have to evangelize Linux as much anymore. Nobody needs to be convinced. That battle is over. It’s not “Hey you ought to do it,” but “Here’s exactly what you need to do if you want to do it right.” That’s the practical problem we’re trying to solve.

Wired.com: One place where I think you still need to evangelize open source is in mobile app development. There’s a lot of money to be made in Apple’s App Store. And developers have to buy into Apple’s ecosystem to get into that App Store.

Zemlin: Yeah, but, I think there will be a healthy industry rebalancing there. It’s unlikely in my mind that Apple will end up with the same de facto API standard that Microsoft achieved in the 1980s and ’90s.

How locked in are you with your $2 and $3 single-serving apps? How many of them are deal-breakers? Because I don’t think you can lock people into a single app store that easily.

Other companies are launching their own app stores now. If you want to be on par with the Apple App Store, it’s totally within reach. There are about 200,000 apps in the Apple store. But really, the top ten pages are the only ones that matter. I’ve got to have Pandora, Tweetdeck, Facebook.

Wired.com: Those are all free apps.

Zemlin: There are very few apps you need to buy, so the important thing is to get the good free apps ported to your platform. I think it’s an advantage Apple has right now, but it won’t be a huge competitive advantage when the next cool device comes along and everyone wants to port to it.

Wired.com: A big advantage iOS has is games.

Zemlin: I game a lot on my iPhone and on my Android phone. App Stores will remain the primary delivery mechanism for games.

But as far as other apps, I’m a huge, huge believer in HTML5. I honestly think that’s the future. Outside of gaming, HTML5 is going to be the new paradigm. With browser-based apps, the complaints have always been things like “there’s no local storage” or “there aren’t enough UI controls,” or “I can’t drag and drop.” HTML5 is changing all that stuff.

For games, you’ll still use the native tools like Objective C because you need the performance and all that goodness. You’ll see federated app stores like Android and Apple have, and those will be primarily for games and rich media apps.

But for everything else, when you’re moving from one device to the next throughout the day, I think the bulk of your user experience will center around cloud-based apps that run on the web.

Wired.com: How else is the app store model going to change?

Zemlin: What you’ll see in a few years is the emergence of app warehouses that service app stores.

What’s hard about shipping apps? On-ramping is hard. There are a bunch of handsets out there, and you have to check to make sure your app will run on all those devices. Apple is kind of simple — there are only four iPhone models now — but Android has a bunch of phones and it ends up being complicated.

Next, you have to have distribution and billing. Billing is really hard, especially now that carriers are considering integrating app purchases into the regular carrier billing system. It’s a nightmare.

So imagine how easy this would be — I’m an app developer, and I go into an app warehouse. I see three or four different OSes on half a dozen different architectures. I can see share amongst all those. I study up and decide I’m going to build an app that runs on these three platforms. I submit my code and the warehouse does compatibility checks for me. Then the warehouse will distribute my app for me, sending it to app stores run by BMW, or by China Mobile, or Comcast. The warehouse handles all the billing, and at the end of the month, I just get one check.

No matter which retailer sells my app, I don’t have to worry about anything. I pay 15 or 20 percent of gross for the convenience?

These already exist. Intel has something called AppUp. It only supports Atom, and eventually we’ll see stores that support all kinds of different architectures. But it’s great. You put an app in there, they take care of everything, and you get paid.

That model will get ironed out over the next couple of years. And it’s better than the alternative, which is iTunes. But nobody’s going to give Apple 30 percent of gross revenue forever. Even services are all through Apple. That’s so absurd, and just unsustainable.

And of course, all that warehouse stuff will be Linux (laughs).

Wired.com: Apple still has a huge lead, though. Businesses want to be on the iPhone and the iPad because having an iPad app with your name on it is so sexy. It’s the VIP party, everyone wants in.

Zemlin: There are going to be a lot more parties. They may not be the hippest parties but they’ll be popular. There will be many, many more tablet devices, and the hot apps will be on those tablets, I guarantee it.

Creating a really good user experience is the hardest part. There are things you can do with power management and boot times and responsiveness to make some kick-ass hardware, and Linux is really good at that. But at the end of the day, good user interface design is key. And it’s an art, it takes discipline. Apple is great at that.

In a way, Apple is the best thing that’s happened to Linux in years. It wakes up the whole industry to say “Hey, we need an app store, too. We want to start offering value-adds on top of our hot new product.” And the only platform they can use to get up and running quickly is Linux. You’re not going to build a proprietary operating system to compete with iOS overnight. Even HP went and bought Palm and webOS.

You’re talking to a guy who spent a decade fighting against Microsoft on the desktop. The whole time, our greatest enemy was the WinAPI. And that’s gone now. So, thank you, Apple. That’s a great gift.

LinuxCon runs August 10 through 12 in Boston, Massachusetts.

Photos: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

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