Linux and open source development is not a zero sum game. This was the explicit message from Ubuntu Technical Architect Allison Randal’s keynote speech at LinuxCon, but the sentiment had been articulated in a number of ways all week long from everyone here. The processes by which a company makes great open source software improve the world for everyone.
“Free software is a fundamentally superior model for developing software,” Randal repeated several times. In addition to the classic Linus’ Law (“given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow”), Randal put forward the claim that human beings long to be part of something greater than themselves, and free software development satisfies that in spades. → Read More
Almost every single keynote at LinuxCon, and certainly every private conversation I had with folks here, involved “cloud” in some way. As Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst observed in his keynote, there’s no single definition of “cloud”. There’s no doubt that Amazon has really pioneered the default cloud offering, but there’s a lot of work going on to build better, more robust, and more open cloud solutions.
Red Hat has OpenShift, their Platform as a Service offering, and CloudForms, their Infrastructure as a Service offering. The long-term vision, according to Whitehurst, is that a company’s developers would begin building something on OpenShift, and not worry about any of the underlying infrastructure. When that product is ready to be deployed internally, it would go on the customer’s CloudForms installation inside the company’s firewall. Basically, developers will select the platform and operations can then own and manage that platform. → Read More
Jim Whitehurst, CEO of Red Hat, just delivered a terrific opening keynote presentation for LinuxCon. Whitehurst isn’t just a businessman, he’s also a geek. He used Linux and open source before joining Red Hat, and the opportunity to be CEO of the world’s most successful open source company was a dream come true for him. After a quick summary of some of the major milestones Linux has seen over the last twenty years, he jumped into the heart of his keynote: what’s next? Whitehurst wasted no time in answering this question: “I have no idea.”
This is a somewhat uncommon response from a CEO, but it makes perfect sense for anyone even moderately familiar with Linux. Linux has seen so much growth in so many markets that it is almost a foolish exercise to try to make predictions about what’s next for Linux. Nevertheless, he had some thoughts about what the OS and ecosystem might soon be enabling. → Read More
The Linux Foundation‘s 20th anniversary of Linux celebration is happening in August at LinuxCon. As part of the buildup to the big shindig they had a t-shirt design contest for LinuxCon. The creator of the winning design will get a free trip to LinuxCon to rub elbows with the likes of Linux creator Linus Torvalds himself. In addition, the winning design will be the official shirt of LinuxCon. This year’s contest had more than 130 submissions, and the Linux Foundation has narrowed this down to six finalists. → Read More
LinuxCon, the big Linux conference put on by the Linux Foundation, is heading to Sao Paulo, Brazil this year. This makes the third location for regional LinuxCon events after Boston, Mass in the U.S.A. an Tokyo, Japan in Asia. Why Brazil? “Brazil leads many other countries in its adoption of Linux and is a growing base of development. The time is right to take the industry’s premier Linux conference to Brazil,” said Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation. Full press release inside. → Read More
The Linux Foundation has announced the first round of keynote speakers for LinuxCon, their annual Linux conference. The line up this year includes some interesting folks, including Stormy Peters, executive director of the GNOME Foundation, and Ravi Simhambhatla, CIO for Virgin America. In addition to a “Linux Kernel Roundtable” with notable kernel maintainers there will also be a number of mini-summits with focused discussion on specific aspects of Linux development: file systems, KVM, Xen, power management, and more. → Read More
I’ve been a full-time Linux user since 1999. I’ve been an advocate for Linux and Free Software for most of that time. My advocacy efforts usually stay within my social group, or at FreeGeek Columbus, though occasionally I’ll use my posts here to support the penguin. Linux, as an open source project developed by an ad-hoc group of people, often with competing agendas, has succeeded without much mainstream advertising. Microsoft had their laptop shopper commercials, and Apple has had their wildly successful “I’m a Mac” commercials, but there have been few Linux commercials. In the open source style of Linux development, now’s your chance to change that state of affairs! → Read More
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