September 03, 2011, 8:03 AM — As the executive director of the Linux Foundation, Jim Zemlin is frequently asked to forecast the future of the IT industry. While he's happy to do so, he's the first to admit that he could be wrong. He joked in his opening remarks at LinuxCon 2011 held recently in Vancouver, British Columbia, that he has been wrongly predicting the Year of the Linux Desktop for many years now. He doesn't need to know the future, he says, because open source projects don't need a master plan.
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During LinuxCon in Vancouver, Zemlin sat down with Network World editors Julie Bort and Jon Brodkin to discuss this concept. He explained why Linux's success is different from other operating systems; why its ability to capture the desktop might never matter; that MeeGo may not be as dead as it looks and that the next big thing is HTML5. Here is an edited transcript of the interview.
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