Penguins Descend On NYC For LinuxWorld

This year’s gathering of LinuxWorld, East Coast Edition is very different than its predecessors.

For starters, the event is in New York City; last year, it convened in Boston. Moreover, the event isn’t even your standard LinuxWorld and bears the long moniker of LinuxWorld Open Solutions Summit.

As the title indicates, this event is all about software solutions.

The big news that is likely to emerge out of the event is the formal announcement of the Open Solutions Alliance (OSA), a new consortium of open source companies focused on advocacy and marketing as well as the interoperability of open source solutions.

The new group intends to host a panel discussion Thursday to divulge details about the group’s plans.

The OSA isn’t the only group that will be talking about solutions. Adobe , eBay , EnterpriseDB, Google , IBM  and a long list of other notables will be talking about their own case studies and open source solutions experience.

Security luminary and BT Counterpane CTO Bruce Schneier will speak in a keynote session Wednesday, while Novell CIO Debra Anderson is slated to take that spot Thursday.

Notably, enterprise Linux leader Red Hat  will not be making a formal appearance at the show.

A Red Hat spokesperson explained to internetnews.com that the reasons for Red Hat’s absence are the same reasons why it wasn’t at last summer’s LinuxWorld San Francisco show; the vendor has other avenues in which it wants to spend its dollars and other conferences where it wants to tell its tale.

That’s not to say the Red Hat won’t have its share of news this week. Red Hat today announced that it is joining the Interop Vendor Alliance. Originally formed in 2006, the Interop Vendor Alliance exists to boost the interoperability of its members’ solutions.

As part of the effort, Red Hat’s JBoss Middleware application will be worked on to further improve interoperability with Microsoft’s Windows operating system.

It’s not the titanic interoperability agreement that Novell and Microsoft are talking about, but it’s interoperability none the less.

Red Hat is also expected this week to make a release candidate of its flagship Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 (RHEL) distribution available. Beta 2 of RHEL 5 was released in November 2006.

The actual formal release date for RHEL 5 has not yet been announced though it is expected before the end of the first quarter of 2007.

Linux players won’t be the only vendors making news this week. Unix vendors and even Microsoft will make their impact felt this week as well.

Sun today unveiled a major new open source push with the release of its Solaris Express Developer Edition distribution . The effort is part of an initiative to gain developer mindshare on the Solaris platform.

HP Thursday is widely expected to release an update to its HP-UX 11i Unix operating system as well.

Microsoft is trying to get some Linux love too, though Microsoft is taking a more literal approach. Seeing as the LinuxWorld event takes place over the Valentine’s Day holiday, Microsoft is hosting a get-together after the event Wednesday to share the love.

Though the words love and Microsoft are rarely heard in combination in reference to Microsoft and Linux, Microsoft is no stranger to LinuxWorld events. Microsoft’s Bill Hilf delivered the <A HREF=”https://www.internetnews.com/dev-news/article.php/3597191″>first LinuxWorld Microsoft keynote ever at LinuxWorld Boston last year.