OStatic

In a year that's been pretty rough on commercial conferences, community run events like FOSDEM, SCALE, SouthEast LinuxFest, LinuxFest Northwest and this past weekend's Ontario GNU Linux Fest are thriving. Why is that? Community conferences win out for a number of reasons.

Attending conferences is a big part of my job, and over the years I've started to take note of what events are worth attending and which events aren't. By and large, it's the smaller community events that are worth your time and money.

Obama's inauguration must have brought out the optimist in tech journalists. In the last week, Ron Miller and Charles Babcock have written to implore Microsoft to open source Windows. While inspired and with some solid reasoning, I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon. Here's why.

Bob Evans calls out Oracle's ridiculous pricing model over on InformationWeek, but strangely overlooks the pressure from open source.

In Evans' open letter to Larry Ellison, he pleads for Oracle to start negotiating with its customers:

Shortly after lunch at the last day of LCA, Linus Torvalds took the first snip of Bdale Garbee's beard with a pair of garden shears. Garbee, acting secretary for the Debian Project and HP's Linux CTO, has given his beard to help save the Tasmanian Devil.

The Linux community is nothing if not altruistic. This year's Linux.conf.au has not only served as a vehicle to gather community and learn about Linux, but also as an opportunity to educate about the plight of Tasmanian Devils.

This post by Dan Kusnetzky highlights one of the things that open source and free software projects have to contend with: Free isn't enough to carry the day.

A key challenge faced by any open source project is getting mindshare. Itﾒs a truism that if decision makers donﾒt know about a product, they wonﾒt consider it. If they donﾒt consider it, theyﾒll select other approaches. There are too many people shouting out their own Xen messages.

After a long search, the Linux Foundation has found its community manager for its LSB Developer Network. The Linux Foundation has tapped Brian Proffitt, longtime managing editor of Linux Today, Enterprise Linux Today, AllLinuxDevices, LinuxPR, and JustLinux.

OStatic: For readers who aren't familiar with Linux Today, could you give a bit of background on the site and yourself?

Brian Proffitt: Wait, who's not familiar with Linux Today? Are you kidding me? Have you been talking to those people at SourceForge again? Boy, what characters...

Iﾒm a bit taken aback by this post by Jason Harris over on the KDE Developerﾒs Journals site. Harris says that ﾔ KDE, like many other open-source projects, doesnﾒt really need users at all, whether they are poisonous or not.ﾔ

Now, a qualifier ﾗ Harris' post is provoked by a discussion of ﾓpoisonousﾔ users, i.e., those select few users who turn up and (intentionally or not) do ﾓcontributeﾔ to the project in the form of dissonance and conflict, but the idea that open source doesnﾒt need users is one that should be strongly refuted.I think virtually everyone agrees that projects would be better off without the trolls, griefers, and assorted characters whose presence adds up to a drag on the project rather than just a passive consumer of code or fan of the project.

Andy Patrizio, over at InternetNews.com, is trotting out that tired old question once again: where are the open source billionaires? as if that was somehow relevant or necessary for open source to be worthwhile. Patrizio also suggests that open source is being carried by large vendors, but doesn't seem to grasp the benefits that the vendors are getting out of open source.

Mike Gunderloy's post on FOSS Factory got me thinking about what Linux needs to gain mass market acceptance. After thinking about it, I've come up with a list of four things that the Linux community needs that aren't (as far as I know) yet in the works.

This isn't a list of impossible goals -- all of these things are attainable if the Linux industry and community were to decide that they are priorities. That's not to say that they'd be easy to accomplish, but the Linux community has proven good at working together when it's important.

Word around the campfire is that Microsoft is starting to get a bit impatient with Yahoo! That's a good thing, from where I'm sitting.

A report from Todd Bishop's Microsoft Blog (on the Seattle Post-Intelligencer Web site) has the details, from an unnamed source.