From the ’20 Years Young’ files:
VANCOUVER. This week the Linux community celebrates the 20th anniversary of Linux at LinuxCon.
With three full days and six concurrent tracks there is no shortage of Linux content to take in. While I personally have often wanted to be in more than one place at the same time, there are certainly some really key presentations that attendees should not miss.
On Wednesday AM Jim Zemlin, Exec Director warms up the crows with a keynote titled,”Imagine a World Without Linux”. (Umm no thank-you, i’d rather not) Zemlin is always an engaging speaker and shouldn’t be missed. Zemlin is actually just the warm-up act for Linux’s Billion dollar man (or CEO), Jim Whitehurst of Red Hat.
Whitehurst will be talking about the next 20 years of Linux and I’ll bet you that his talk has a whole lot of discussion on cloud and platform virtualization.
Jon Corbet of LWN is also a guy that shouldn’t be missed. His state of the kernel talks are always a highlight for me. At LinuxCon he’s talking about 20 years of Kernel development. Talking about kernel development, Greg Kroah-Hartman is talking about the stable Linux Kernel tree which is likely to be a lively topic.
The highlight of the first day and perhaps the event as a hole also comes on the first day with an on-stage conversation between Kroah-Hartman and the man that started it all – Linus Torvalds.
On Wednesday, HP will deliver a keynote on how WebOS will change the consumer electronics industry which should also be interesting. The highlight of Day 2 should be the media roundtable in the afternoon. Yes, I’m on that panel (again). The official title of the panel is “Reporting on Linux’s Past, Present and Future”. I can guarantee it will be lively conversation from the brightest minds reporting on Linux today. Last year’s panel was standing room only, so I hope they got a bigger room this year.
No open source event would be complete in 2011 without a keynote that specifically addresses the cloud. At LinuxCon 2011 that task falls to Marten Mickos of Eucalyptus (formerly of Sun/MySQL).
No the above is not a complete list of session I’ll be in (I like to hope between rooms depending on how things go). With so many concurrent sessions on nearly every topic that touches Linux, this sure looks to be a great event.
As part of the celebration, the Linux Foundation has also done an interesting infographics on Linux now and then. The growth of Linux over the last 20 years has been nothing short of amazing.
