Summit Attendees Discuss Concerns, Gains with Linux

Amidst the halls of a former seminary built in the 19th Century, the future of 21st technology was explored in the 2008 Linux Foundation End User Summit.

The Desmond Tutu Center in Manhattan might seem like an unlikely venue for Linux developers and end users to congregate, but the updated facility's nooks and crannies proved a good place for lots of impromptu discussions between Summit attendees.

The End User Summit, the first of its kind for the Linux Foundation, was an invitation-only event attended by end users of Linux, as well as kernel developers and commercial vendors, with the goal of providing new lines of communication between these groups.

While at first glance it might not seem a good fit for end users to mingle with kernel developers, the two-day event demonstrated repeatedly a great desire on the part of the end user community to understand how the Linux works on a deep technical level and how their companies can participate more in Linux or benefit more from its features.

Keynotes for the event included a discussion from Anthony Williams, author of Wikinomics, How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, and Jonathan Corbet, editor of Linux Weekly News and creator of the Linux Weather Forecast.

The first day was marked by several panel discussions, which allowed attendees to get some specific questions answered, such as how Linux fits in current enterprise operations and how corporate end users can participate more in the Linux development process.

During these discussions, one prevalent theme that came up was a certain level of hesitancy on the part of the end users to give back code to the open source development community, because of fears that returning code would reveal too much information to their competitors on how they conducted their business practices.

One attendee shared with the rest of the conference that he was glad at this point just to have convinced his company's legal and technical staffs of the benefits of just consuming Linux and other open source software. To him, that was a major accomplishment in itself. He added that he has no intention of stopping there, but he faced strong challenges convincing his company to give back to open source.

This concern was brought up more than once, but end users who expressed this were given different pieces of advice from a strong source: their fellow users from other companies who have been in the same boat, too.

One surprise during Day One was the attendance of the conference by Canonical founder and CEO Mark Shuttleworth, which led to an impromptu panel presentation with him, Novell CEO Ron Hovsepian, and Red Hat President Paul Cormier. One attendee was heard to remark that the cooperative nature of open source "had never been drilled so strongly into me until I saw those three guys on stage together and talking honestly about how they compete and help each other at the same time."

The second day of the conference was divided into four tracks of sessions: Legal/Business, Futures, Operations, and Performance. Many attendees also used the opportunity to get into smaller groups and go over their specific needs. Several Linux kernel developers, including James Bottomley, Andrew Morton, and Theodore T'so, were in attendance at the Summit, and attendees were often seen in discussions with these and other kernel developers.

Because the event was invitation-only, end users were encouraged by the Linux Foundation's Jim Zemlin to speak freely about their concerns, as they would be in held in discretion during the Summit. This approach seemed to work; at the beginning of the Summit, some hesitation was noted amongst the conference-goers, but faded as the Summit continued.

This marks the first End User Summit for the Linux Foundation, which hopes to make it an annual event. The event is one of a series of specialized events organized by the Linux Foundation, which includes the Collaboration Summit, the Kernel Summit, and--beginning next September--the LinuxCon community event.