At the start of the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit on the Canary Islands, Richard Stallman, Robert Lefkowitz and Walter Bender rallied open source developers in their common tasks.

FISL 10.0 in Porto Alegre, Brazil was the best yet, for many reasons. For a long time I have been impressed with how the FISL organizers (most, if not all of which are volunteers) have brought together government, industry and the community to put on an ever-larger and more complex event.

Developers from Debian and Ubuntu met and discussed ways to improve boot performance at Canonical’s London headquarters.

When it comes to software engineering, we need more of it.

In the conference's traditional "Kernel Kwestioning" seminar this year in Berlin, 11 kernel developers addressed questions from the public. The result was that the panel of experts invited the entire community to send Linux drivers to the kernel mailing list, quality notwithstanding.

OpenVZ project leader Kir Kolyshkin clarified at LinuxTag 2009 that the software also lends itself to Linux resource management.

In his keynote at the LinuxTag 2009 in Berlin, KDE founder Matthias Ettrich spoke about the future of user interfaces on mobile devices. In the process he presented QML, the newest development from his employer Qt Software.

LinuxTag once again features the best and brightest among open source. More than 10,000 visitors are expected at the Berlin conference starting June 24 and running through June 27. Many free projects are exhibiting. Prizes and a press conference started things off.