SCaLE 7x is Open for Registration

The Southern California Linux Expo opened registration for its 2009 event on December 30th. The event will take place February 20-22nd, 2009, in Los Angeles, California.

The SCaLE organizers have filled the available speaker tracks, and this year's events include co-hosted mini-conferences, such as the Women in Open Source Conference (a continuation of last year's discussions to encourage women of all ages to become involved in FOSS), and the Open Source Software in Education Conference (focusing on FOSS in the K-12 setting).

The Demonstrating Open-Source Health Care Solutions conference will be held at the SCaLE venue during the conference, but as it is run by a third party, those wishing to attend will need to register with the DOHCS organizers.

The Expo floor is filling fast, but if you're involved with a project (or company) who'd like to host a booth, SCaLE has instructions on contacting the appropriate parties for exhibit space. A number of non-profit and commercial exhibitors are already on tap, including Fedora, Ubuntu, OpenVZ, Rockbox, Sun, IBM and O'Reilly.

The future of tech-related conferences is uncertain, but as some pass into history, others seem to be assuming slightly different approaches. SCaLE, the Ohio LinuxFest, and the Linux Foundation's new LinuxCon are tending to focus less on enterprise and industry professionals, and instead draw in smaller businesses, non-profit (non-IT) industries, and individuals. Whether this approach will work in the long term isn't certain, but it seems plausible that after years of preaching to the "already keen on open source" enterprise choir, the conferences who target new voices will sing different -- but no less vibrant -- songs.