Boston's Summer of (FOSS) Love

Paw Prints: Writings of the maddog

There will be a lot of Linux activity in Boston this summer, all before the middle of August.

The Red Hat Summit and JBOSS World leads the parade with four days of training and talks, June 22nd to June 24th. I have a great deal of respect for Red Hat and their engineering staff, having worked with many of them when they were at Digital Equipment Corporation, and I know that I will enjoy seeing some of the talks on filesystems, virtualization, cloud computing, security and a lot of other topics that are of interest to me in general as a Linux enthusiast. Unfortunately due to a prior commitment, I will only be at the Summit Wednesday and Thursday.

The Advanced Computing Systems Association, also known as USENIX, is holding their Federated Conferences Week exactly the same four days as the Red Hat Summit, in a hotel that is “just a subway ride away”. The USENIX people always have interesting talks about a wide range of OS considerations, often things that will show up in a “year or two” in products. This year is no different with whole workshops on social networking, Cloud technologies, storage, “extreme scale” computing, webapps, configuration management and much more.

Last (but certainly not least) will be LinuxCon North America happening on August 10th - 12th with two days of “mini-summits” on August 8th and 9th, and a two day Linux Performance Tuning training course (extra charge) also on August 8th and 9th.

The “mini-summits” are a great idea. I have attended other mini-summits at other events, and it gives developers and researchers face-to-face time which help to iron out issues quickly. Most of the mini-summits are oriented toward developers and researchers in the fields of “Open Clouds”, Filesystems and Storage, KVM, Kernel and User-Level Tracing, Education, Power Management, Linux Security and Bluetooth, but some of the mini-summits are also open to interested end-users.

Registration for the mini-summits is included in the LinuxCon registration. I intend on going to the “Open Cloud” summit, although it will be one day after my 60th birthday, and I may be a little bit under the weather (no pun intended) for the cloud mini-summit.

Boston is a great city, with lots of good ethnic food, sites to see and a good public transportation system. It is where some of the first computers were built (Harvard's Mark I and Mark II computers) where the term “bug” was first applied to computers by Grace Murray Hopper (Mark II), and where the term “Hacker” was first applied to software (MIT's TMRC). It is the home to the Free Software Foundation (www.fsf.org). This summer Boston will also host a lot of FOSS activity, where I am sure more computer science history will be made.

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