WHEN LINUX WON'T DO

Jonni Bidwell meets Kate Stewart, senior director of Strategic Programs at the Linux Foundation, to talk about Zephyr, licenses, garbage trucks and reindeer.

- Jonni Bidwell

Back in LXF247, we interviewed the Zephyr Project’s Thea Aldritch, where we learned Zephyr is a tiny real-time operating system (RTOS) that is destined for great things. Zephyr is not Linux, but that didn’t stop kernel don Greg Kroah-Hartman, in our last issue, describing it as one of his favorite Linux Foundation projects.

Kate has had over 30 years’ experience in the software world as a developer and a manager. She’s also a key player in the SPDX project, which aims to sort out code licensing once and for all. She gives us an update on what’s new with the Zephyr project, and how it’s learning from Linux.

Linux Format: Can you tell me about your role at the Linux Foundation?

Kate Stewart: Well I’m the director of the project board, so that means I interface between the board and the technical community. I work on strategy and try and build relationships within various parts of the ecosystem. I help to build the ecosystem and try to make sure that any problems that come up are addressed.

There are a lot of places I’d like Zephyr to go this year. We just formed a relationship with the Eclipse IoT people, because they’ve got communication stacks and protocols, but they needed a good underlying RTOS to power them all – they had an open spot there. So finding where we can be complementary and reinforce other open-source projects is something we feel strongly about.

LXF: I met with Thea at the Open Source Summit in 2018, and one of the things that made the Zephyr Project so special was the openness of the community. Can you speak about that?