LinuxCon Highlights: From Linus Torvalds to Microsoft

This year’s LinuxCon North America conference highlighted the latest in Linux and open-source technologies—and showcased both the expected and unexpected.

IBM announced and displayed its new LinuxONE mainframe. The LinuxONE Emperor is based on the z13 mainframe.

Linux creator Linus Torvalds said during a keynote question-and-answer session that he didn’t have a 10-year vision for Linux. “I’m a very plodding, pedestrian person and look only about six months ahead,” Torvalds said. “I look at the current release and the next one, as I don’t think planning 10 years ahead is sane.”

During his annual Kernel Report session at LinuxCon, Linux kernel developer Jonathan Corbet said it now takes approximately 63 days for the community to build a new Linux kernel milestone.

Among LinuxCon North America’s 2015 sponsors were many of the usual suspects—including IBM, HP, Intel, Red Hat and SUSE. Microsoft was one surprising new sponsor.

Among the hottest items given away at the LinuxCon event were Tux Linux penguins with the Microsoft name on it.

Diogo Mónica, security lead for Docker, did a live demo of the new Docker Content Trust security feature. With Docker Content Trust, there is a verifiable way to make sure that a given Docker application image is authentic.

Deepak Singh, general manager of Amazon’s Elastic Cloud Compute container service, explained how the company enables organizations to deploy and use containers in the Amazon cloud.

While there is no shortage of hype surrounding containers, Wim Coekaerts, senior vice president of Linux and virtualization engineering at Oracle, reminded everyone that containers are really all about applications.