"As part of the Linux Foundation Technical board, we confront the issue of closed source Linux kernel modules all the time, and we wanted to do something that could be seen as a general 'public statement' about them that is easy to understand and point to when people have questions," began Greg KH, explaining, "so, after working on this for a while, and asking some of the other major contributors and maintainers of the kernel, what we have is below." a FAQ on the Linux Foundation website provides more background on the statement, which was undersigned by nearly 140 Linux kernel hackers. The statement reads:

"We, the undersigned Linux kernel developers, consider any closed-source Linux kernel module or driver to be harmful and undesirable. We have repeatedly found them to be detrimental to Linux users, businesses, and the greater Linux ecosystem. Such modules negate the openness, stability, flexibility, and maintainability of the Linux development model and shut their users off from the expertise of the Linux community. Vendors that provide closed-source kernel modules force their customers to give up key Linux advantages or choose new vendors. Therefore, in order to take full advantage of the cost savings and shared support benefits open source has to offer, we urge vendors to adopt a policy of supporting their customers on Linux with open-source kernel code."

James Bottomley announced the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board election results from September 5th, "sorry this has taken so long to get out ... I just, er, forgot." He noted that there were eight candidates. "Every candidate gave a nomination statement before the voting (with the three persons not present having their statements read to the meeting). We did single polling per position and had two rounds for a tie on the last candidate."

James then stated that the five people elected to the advisory board were, Arjan van de Ven, Greg Kroah Hartman, Christoph Lameter, Jon Corbett, and Olaf Kirch. The purpose of the advisory board was discussed earlier.

"The elections for five of the ten members of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board[TAB] are held every year, currently the election will be at the 2007 Kernel Summit in a BOF session," James Bottomley, the TAB chair, announced on the Linux Kernel mailing list. He noted that this voting session would be held on the evening of September 5'th or 6'th, providing an email address for sending nominations and adding that anyone is eligible, "only people invited to the kernel summit will be there in person (and therefore able to vote), but if you cannot attend, your nomination email will be read out before the voting begins." James went on to explain:

"It's really just a represent the community type of role. The LF uses the TAB to get a sense of the community for various things they and their members are thinking. Conversely, the TAB was initially formed to get a set of specific objectives out of the then OSDL (Doc Fellowship, Travel Fund, NDA programme and HW lending library plus a few other things). The TAB takes proposals from the community for things it needs that require an organisation to sort out (a good example of this is the currently being acted on PCI sig membership, which will give us access to the PCI specs plus a vendor ID that the virtualisation people asked for to help with virtual device recognition)."