A Week of Intense, Incredible Linux Conferences
April 29th, 2009[Parts of this post were previously published on Jeff’s Open Source Resource, but there are some new bits too! Prizes available for spotting the differences.]
I attended and presented at the 2009 Embedded Linux Conference and the 2009 Linux Collaboration Summit. The conferences were co-located at the Kabuki Hotel in San Francisco, CA. Both conferences were extremely useful individually, but the combination of the two was absolutely electric.
At ELC, I attended some fantastic sessions, beginning with Dirk Hohndel’s keynote on ubiquitous Linux—very appropriate for an embedded conference, as much of the ubiquity he described is manifested from the embedded systems space. Cell phones and the networks that drive them, all of the multiple layers of networking equipment around us, the search engines and bookstores and LOLcats we hit every day, all are driven by Linux, largely by embedded Linux. His theoretical challenge was to go for a certain amount of time in the modern world without touching Linux, which very shortly led to not being able to even cross the street in many large cities.
The rest of the conference was full of fascinating information. I attended a presentation on Maemo, a keynote by embedded maintainer David Woodhouse, a great talk by embedded luminary Jim Ready, a fascinating discussion by David Mandala from Ubuntu on how they got such a large distro to work well in an ARM environment, and an extremely interesting panel hosted by Tim Bird and featuring Matt Mackall, Jon Corbet, and David Woodhouse. Tuesday evening provided a showcase of demos, including my demo of Meld running in Firefox, on Montabello, on a Beagle Board.
Wednesday was a rough one, because it was the day the two conferences overlapped. It was quite odd to wake up to find the population in the hotel’s conference area quadrupled, quite literally, and the rooms were physically changed around to accommodate all of the new conferencegoers. I didn’t get a chance to see many of the remaining ELC technical talks because I was riveted by the Collaboration Summit keynotes, most of which addressed community either directly or indirectly. I also managed to meet several community leaders, including Karsten Wade, Joe Brockmeier, and Jono Bacon. As a newcomer to community management, I found all of them welcoming, open, and filled with advice about community-building. The advice itself was worth the price of the trip—they gave me a lot to think about, particularly Karsten, whose role with the Fedora community is probably most similar to mine in the embedded space.
I gave my ELC presentation Wednesday as well, and was pleased to see some participation despite being opposite a very compelling panel featuring representatives from Sun, Microsoft, and the Linux Foundation. Note that Free Electrons recorded all of the sessions at ELC, including mine, so I expect to see those online in the coming weeks. Well done again, guys, and great to meet you in person!
The Linux Collaboration Summit is normally an invitation-only affair. This year, however, they invited all ELC members to stay for the remaining two days and participate. Thursday and Friday were simply a blur of packed sessions, including one that Joerg Bertholdt, VP Mktg at MontaVista, and I gave during the Community Best Practices track on Friday morning. The attendees were mostly community managers and active members, and we had a lively discussion about community and its role in product development and commericalization as well as some details about Meld itself. Our slides are available for anyone who would like them.
I came home exhausted on Friday afternoon, very grateful for such events and eager for more (after a rest!).
