The Latest from LinuxCon
LinuxCon was the talk of the town this week with their announcements dominating the headlines. In other news, Ian Murdock blogged about how he came to Linux with a big thanks to Linus himself. Speaking of Linus, he made several headlines with his Q&A at LinuxCon this morning. Antergos got an update today, after my not having much luck with the last release last night. Dedoimedo said the Cinnamon desktop isn't "all sugar and spice" and Matthew Garrett didn't get a satisfying answer on intellectual property from Shuttleworth at LinuxCon.
LinuxCon has ruled the newswaves the last few days. LinuxCon is a large conference of Linux developers, advocates, and leaders taking place this week. It kicked off Monday with a keynote address from Jim Zemlin, Executive Director Linux Foundation, on distributed genius or "thousands of unique contributors creating billions of dollars of value." Elsewhere that day Jon Corbet said 63 days has become the normal time period to get out a new kernel release. Monday also brought a big powwow on cloud storage attended by the likes of Red Hat, Toshiba, and Cisco. IBM's big Ubuntu on the mainframe announcement got lots of headlines that same day as well, as did their involvement with new Open Mainframe Project.
The major announcement yesterday out of LinuxCon was the Linux Foundation's new initiative dubbed the Badge Program. "The Core Infrastructure Initiative (CII) Badge Program is a free program designed with the open source community with criteria that evolves to allow for compensating controls rather than a strict mechanical process." Also announced was this years Linux scholarship winners.
The two big stories today were the announcement of new Linux performance workgroup and a Q&A with rockstar Linus Torvalds. The new Linux Foundation collaborative project, DiaMon, is to create a "de facto standard for tracing and monitoring infrastructure in order to improve diagnostics of Linux user space programs." Torvalds' Q&A session grabbed a few headlines as well with some calling it a surprise visit despite being on the schedule. He was quoted as saying, "I love open source and how all that credit goes to me.” He also said you can never get rid of all bugs, you just "try to mitigate them by having multiple layers of security, so that if you have a hole in one component, the next component will catch it, hopefully." Torvalds then said he don't like to try and plan for 10 years out, that he does well to plan for the next six months. In related news, Swapnil Bhartiya interviewed Jim Zemlin at LinuxCon about the secret sauce to foundation success. LinuxCon concluded this evening with a reception at the Experience Music Project Museum.
Antergos got a new installer today because "previously, Cnchi did not detect errors until after all packages had been downloaded. That meant (depending on your connection speed) you could potentially wait an hour, two, or more just to find out that Cnchi can’t continue. Obviously, that sucks." That's so funny because I encountered that very issue last night, thanks to a a slideshow from Matt Harley saying Antergos is one of the best. I suppose I'll give the new installer a chance later.
And in other news:
* Ian Murdock, Founder of Debian: How I came to find Linux
* Matthew Garrett: Canonical's deliberately obfuscated IP policy
* Cinnamon: Not all Sugar and Spice
* Meet Kali Linux 2.0, a distro built to hammer your security
* Christian Schaller: An Open Letter to the Apache Foundation and OpenOffice Team