Community-cation

I gotta say, I'm pretty excited today. We've announced the 2009 event schedule, and we've added a new event for the Linux community: LinuxCon.

This is a conference that, like our other summits, is specifically geared towards a certain segment of the Linux community. The Kernel Summit we just hosted, as one example, is for the kernel developers. The upcoming End Users Summit, as another example, will be an opportunity for corporate end-users of Linux to share their goals and wishes for Linux in their organizations.

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.

The big news at the Linux Foundation this week was not one but two--count 'em!--two events in the lovely Portland, Oregon. Let OSCON pack up and prove it knows the way to San Jose--we like the Rose City, just fine, thank you.

I read this morning that Microsoft has hired a former colleague of mine, Peter Galli, to be a Senior Communications Manager on Microsoft's Platform Strategy team.

I was glad to hear Peter had landed somewhere after Ziff Davis went through its latest round of layoffs a couple of months ago. Granted, not so happy he landed at Microsoft, but it appears his role there will be similar to my role here at the Linux Foundation: community manager.

Since coming onboard with the Linux Foundation, one of the things that I have missed is taking a look at the week gone by to see what's what. I'm glad to say that things have settled down enough that I can now take the time to provide some analysis to what's happened this week.

I have a confession to make: I've pretty much made it a small goal in life to see Mark Shuttleworth get married. Or involved in a steady relationship.

I've reached this conclusion after meeting him a few times and thinking "he's such a nice young man, he should find a girl and settle down." Apparently, there's something about Mark that brings out my inner shadchen. That, and the fact that my wife keeps asking about him anytime I mention I've had a conversation with him. Hmmm...

A former co-worker of mine just passed along the news that OSCON was going to move to San Francisco next year.

For people who went to OSCON this year, myself among them, this was hardly a surprise. It was pretty much the buzz on the conference floor at this year's show... a buzz that continued a couple of weeks later at the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco. O'Reilly, the event organizers, cited travel as a reason for reason not to go.

Most of us have stories about how we have done right by some family member and installed Linux for them in place of that other operating system. I myself have rescued my parental unit from the clutches of Vista.