Highlights from Linuxcon 2010

by Jason Brooks

Linuxcon saw the debut of the Linux Foundation’s Open Compliance Program, which is aimed at smoothing open-source license compliance with tools, training, license reporting standards, consulting and self-assessment checklists.

Oracle Senior Vice President of Linux and Virtualization Engineering Wim Coekaerts gave a keynote in which he detailed Oracle’s use of Linux within its products and internal IT operations, and highlighted several of the upstream Linux projects to which the software giant contributes.

Rob Chandhok, president of the Qualcomm Innovation Center (QuIC), took the stage on Tuesday to talk about Qualcomm’s expanded new role at the Linux Foundation, and to discuss the challenges in open source and mobile.

On Tuesday afternoon, a quartet of Linux kernel development leaders discussed some of the biggest questions facing the project, including the challenge of keeping the kernel project accessible to new developers.

Senior Vice President and General Manager of Novell’s Open Platform Solutions group, Markus Rex, kicked off the show’s second day with a keynote that dealt with the trend toward computing workloads moving to the cloud, and with Novell’s initiatives, such as the SUSE Gallery, to complement those changes.

Jeffrey Hammond, from Forrester Research, was next to Eclipse Community survey, Hammond outlined the growing uptake of Linux and open source within business in general and among developers in particular.

Eben Moglen, of Columbia University and the Software Freedom Law Center, put out a call to action on Wednesday afternoon regarding what’s required to protect Linux and open-source software moving forward. Moglen (pictured here at the recent Debconf10 conference) highlighted the need for careful navigation of software patent issues, of raising awareness of free and open-source software among those new to the concepts, and of keeping the community primed with new ideas.photo credit: aigarius

Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin sat down with Thomas Miller, head of MeeGo Ecosystem Development, and Derek Speed, senior technologist in Intel’s Open-Source Technology Center, to talk about the embedded Linux platform born of the Moblin and Maemo projects. Among other topics, the trio delved into the challenges around building effective app stores, and the expected advantages of keeping development for the project close to its upstream components.

Stormy Peters, executive director of the GNOME Foundation, delivered the first keynote of the conference’s final day, which focused on the challenges that the Web brings to Linux and open-source software, particularly with regard to open data.

For the final Linuxcon keynote, Virgin America CIO Ravi Simhambhatla delivered a glowing assessment of his experiences with Linux and open-source software at the airline. Virgin America taps Linux and open source in a broad range of scenarios. Next time you fly Virgin America, keep an eye on the in-seat entertainment units around takeoff—when the terminals start up, you’ll see the tell tale checked gray and black startup screen of the xorg graphics server.