I had the pleasure to talk to Amanda McPherson, one of the minds behind LinuxCon, "LinuxCon is a new annual technical conference that will provide an unmatched collaboration and education space for all matters Linux". Where and where: September 21 - 23 2009, Portland.

Linux may be a free platform for many and a reasonably inexpensive alternative to Unix and proprietary platforms for others, but make no mistake.

"We were very aware that the growth in mobile for Linux was huge, but we didn't know it was so astronomic," Amanda McPherson, marketing director for the Linux Foundation, told LinuxInsider. "These are very encouraging numbers." Why Linux has drawn significant support from the community of handset manufacturers can be explained on several fronts, McPherson said.

As we begin to close the books on 2008 and look into the proverbial crystal ball for open source in the new year, I thought the Linux Foundation was a logical place to start. So I asked LF Marketing and Developer Programs VP Amanda McPherson what her top five open source predictions would be.

I couldn't help think that question this morning when the news came through from the US that Microsoft will increase its R&D spend by $US1 billion bringing its total to $US9.1 billion every year.

The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced it is publishing an update to its April 2008 study on Linux kernel development. The new report is written by original authors and kernel developers Jonathan Corbet and Greg Kroah-Hartman, and the Linux Foundation's Amanda McPherson

Lora Bentley spoke with Amanda McPherson, marketing and developer programs VP at the Linux Foundation. She and two colleagues recently released a new paper, “Estimating the Total Development Cost of a Linux Distribution.”

Acceptance of the Linux open source operating system has been rising for years. However, the last six to nine months have seen tremendous development of the Linux desktop, according to the Linux Foundation's Amanda McPherson. That progress is remarkable compared to the six years it took Microsoft to get from Windows XP to Windows

Sure, it's called Linux, but the actual software run on one version may not work on another. The best and worst thing about Linux, said the director of the Linux Foundation, is that anyone can call any kernel-derived product “Linux.” But efforts at the Linux Foundation continue the push to remove ambiguity from the Linux ecosystem.