Community-cation: A Look Back at Week 39, 2008

Some good news for the Foundation this week, as we welcomed a new member, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, to our organization. Coming off of our successful Linux Kernel Summit, and the Linux Plumber's Conference that we helped underwrite, it was a good cap to a positive week's worth of news.

Of course, now we're getting ready for the next big event, the End User Collaboration Summit, in New York City on October 13 and 14. I'm really geared for this one, because New York is always a blast, and the program for this show looks exceptional. (And no, I didn't create it, so I'm not bragging on myself, just my co-workers.)

Speaking of co-workers, mine were a bit vocal this week, with Amanda McPherson providing a counter point to Greg Kroah-Hartman's keynote address at the Linux Plumber's Conference. Jim Zemlin put his own two cents in on IBM's stance regarding participation in standards organizations. The standards system is broke, and the Foundation is totally behind any efforts to reform it.

Also on this site, Paul Ferrill contributed another analysis in his continuing series on Linux development tools and languages. This week's article looked at Mono, a toolset that still stirs up controversy in the Linux community, due to it's very purpose of bringing .NET functionality to Linux. Paul's look is an objective one, though, so I hope you can give it a look-see and let us know what you think.

In the meantime, work is proceeding apace on the next version of the Linux Standard Base, 4.0. I've been attending the phone meetings and watching the seemingly-constant IRC sessions, and some of the high-level these people are discussing is finally start to sink in. Maybe you can teach old dogs new tricks. The team is wrapping up some of the big bugs now, and it looks like there should be a beta release of LSB 4.0 soon. Start looking for new articles on LDN in the near future, too, about the latest features in the next version of the LSB.