Community-cation: A Look Back at Week 40, 2008

Here in the US, it's been an interesting week in the financial and government worlds. And I mean "interesting" in the Chinese-curse sense of that word. Like most folks in the country, I've been watching the news with one eye on politics and the other on the ticker tape. Lost in some of the conflaguation of news was the announcement of our new event, LinuxCon, scheduled for September 2009 in Portland, Oregon.

This is going to be a technical conference that will be very open in terms of the content provided. It's going to have technical conference sessions, tutorials, and keynotes... but it isn't going to be a trade show. Some pundits have put forth the idea that yet another show might not be such a hot idea. Given that the popularity of the great regionally based events like SCALE and the Ohio LinuxFest, I would beg to differ.

There also may be a notion out there that the Foundation decided to put on LinuxCon in direct response to OSCON's move from Portland to San Jose, California. Boss-man Jim Zemlin cleared that up, since the Foundation was planning LinuxCon before I even came on board in July... way before anyone knew O'Reilly wanted to move OSCON. My own recent comments in the press about OSCON's move were not intended to slam the show itself; I just don't get the reason of lowering travel costs when you move a show to a more expensive venue not far in time and distance from another big show (LinuxWorld Expo).

Regardless, there is a need for a big user-oriented show. LinuxWorld no longer fits that description--it's become a trade show virtually indistinguishable from other mainstream trade events. That's great for Linux business, not so great for the Linux community. The two, in my opinion, are not separable.

While the events side of the Foundation progresses, work on the next version of LSB (4.0) continues on schedule. Earlier this week, I took a look at the new cryptography libraries that will be within LSB 4.0. If you were expecting the ubiquitous OpenSSL, think again: it's going to be old-school with Network Security Services. NSS offers a lot of flexibiltity in the form of binary compatibility.

LDN also took a good look at a popular area of development: Rich Internet Applications. Linux plays a huge role in RIA, and Paul Ferril takes readers on a tour of the Linux highlights.

Finally, readers looking for our semi-monthly Regular Expressions column will see a slight delay this month: authors Cameron Laird and Kathryn Soraiz were adversely affected by Hurricane Ike and they're still working to put things back together. We extend our hopes for a safe and quick recovery for them!