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Day four of the conference opened with a keynote entitiled “Hackers at the End of the World” by Glyn Moody. Glyn explored the history of sharing in science and art as inspired by the open source movement, and contrasted this with the anti-sharing ‘my gain is your loss’ culture of the global financial community. Glyn postulated that the sharing and indeed sharing of sharing that characterises the FOSS community held a tantalising glimpse of a solution to the global financial and environmental crisis.

Jeremy Allison brought forward an extremely provocative look at Microsoft’s overtures to the open source community with “The Elephant in the Room – Microsoft and Free Software”. Jeremy took the audience through Microsoft’s duality in recent times in attempting to reconsile with the open source community at the same time working against them in the political and regulartory arena.

Jonathan Oxer delighted attendees with a talk on “Tux on the Moon”, showcasing the Lunar Numbat project and it’s efforts to partner with the Google Lunar X-Prize team White Label Space to “… put a Linux powered robotic Australian marsupial on the moon”.

The day was concluded by a Professional Delegates Networking Session at the Wellington Opera House. The final day of the conference will open with a short keynote by Nat Torkington and a series of lightning talks, with the conference Penguin dinner closing the evening activities.

The glorious weather that had punctuated the first two days of the conference held, heralding in the third day in a blaze of sunshine. The conference proper was introduced by a keynote by Benjamin Mako Hill on Antifeatures: Why your software works against you and why software freedom offers hope of a better future. Mako explored the concept of anti-features as deliberately included functionality or a lack of functionality that users hate so much they will pay to have them removed. Some classic examples included the gator spyware that was included with free version of p2p software on the windows platform – with a spyware-free version available for a fee.

Mako took the audience through why anti-features exist to further profits, and showed how in an environment dominated by free and open software they would be unable to survive.

Fowllowing the keynote session, Jonathan Corbet gave his traditional Kernel Report, covering major milestones in kernel development since last year’s conference, and addressing the challenges the kernel development team face in the year to time. Those of us with massively parallel-processing netbooks will be pleased to know the Linux kernel now scales to 4096 cpus.

Matthew Carretts talk on social Success in (and for) the Linux community covered many of the reasons that the Linux community can be a hostile and toxic place for new contributers to enter. He covered how aggressive and confrontational behaviour is rewarded and how as a community Linux will need to learn to welcome and retain new members.

As comic relief I caught Paul Fenwick’s engaging presentation on the World’s Worst Inventions. Covering such gems as cocaine cough-drop marketed to children and the recent children’s bead product that metabolised to GHB when ingested, Paul went through a few hundred years of misguided and downright dangerous inventions.

The fourth day of the conference will feature a keynote by Glyn Moody, provocatively titled ‘Hackers at the End of the World’, and also the Professional Delegates Networking session.

First published on LinuxJournal.com

The second day of the conference dawned just as bright and sunny as the first. The opening keynote was delivered by Gabriella Coleman, Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She spoke on the history of the FOSS movement as birthed by Richard Stallman and it’s paradoxical growth during the same period that governments and corporate bodies were pushing their agenda for stronger IP and copyright control. Gabriella took the audience through the wrangling that forever forced the FOSS community into the political arena and created the biggest threat to the traditional concept of IP that exists today.

Tuesday is traditionally the second day of miniconfs at LCA, with the lineup including:

System Administration Miniconf
Bridging the gap
Open and the Public Sector
Education Miniconf
Data Storage and Retrieval Miniconf
Multicore and Parallel Computing Miniconf
Multimedia Miniconf

For me, the highlight of the day was the talk by Paul Gunn of Weta Digital, who explored the ‘Challenges in Data Centre Growth’ inherent in the demanding task of rendering movie frames. With some limited personal knowledge of the makeup of the infamous Weta render farm, it was fascinating to get a closer look.

This year, Linux.conf.au is hosting a photography competition for delegates and speakers, with four sections breaking the stunning Wellington city sights into quadrants. Entries are accepted for Lambton, Cuba, Courtenay and the Waterfront, roughly delimiting four areas of interest in Wellington’s compact CBD.

The first round of competition entries have been judged with the finalists announced – disclaimer, I was one of them – you’ll all just have to believe me that I intended to mention the competition before I knew!

The first round of finalists were:

Dustin Kirkland
Tim Potter
William Gordon
Jes Fraser

With Dustin Kirkland having entered two winning entries.

Day 3 will usher in the conference proper, starting with a keynote by Benjamin Mako Hill.

First posted on
LinuxJournal.com

January brings with it the southern-hemisphere’s summer and Linux.conf.au. This year, the conference is being held in Wellington, New Zealand thanks to the hard work and dedication of the Capital Cabal, a team of volunteer organisers lead by Susanne and Andrew Ruthven.

After a grey and wintery weekend, Wellington was all smiles for the first day of the conference. Situated at the Town Hall and Wellington Convention Centre close to the waterfront, sunshine, blue skies and balmy temperatures saw quite a few conference goers spending time outside exploring today.

This year’s volunteers are numerous and helpful, and have done an amazing job of making the first day of LCA smoother than any other in memory. For the first time, the conference is being streamed live and streams can be accessed from the schedule on http://lca2010.org.nz. For me, just having the wireless working on day one was impressive enough.

The conference format is the same as previous years, with two days of mini-confs and then three days of conference proper. Monday’s line up included:

Business of Open Source Miniconf
Open Programming Languages Miniconf
Wave Developers Miniconf
Haecksen and Linuxchix Miniconf
Libre Graphics Day
Arduino Miniconf
Distro Summit

I have always enjoyed the first day at LCA, catching up with people I’ve met at previous years and making new connections. Registration is always exciting with the traditional goodie bag to rifle through. Tuesday is when the sessions that pique my interest most start, with talks on systems administration and high-performance computing. I’m really looking forward to it, and from looking at how it’s started, I really think this year’s conference is going to be one of the best.

It’s Linux.conf time of year again, and I’m starting to get that night-before-christmas feeling. This year the conference is being held in my home city of Wellington, New Zealand. Thanks to the generosity of my employer, Modica, I will be spending the entire week at the conference.

I’m going to be blogging the conference here and on LinuxJournal.com which will be a nice motivation to start writing regularly again. I’m looking at the schedule with a particular eye toward kernel and systems administration talks, and anticipating catching up with people I’ve met in previous years.

More than that, every year I return from LCA fired up by feeling a real connection with the community and armed with new knowledge that gives me a direct benefit in my day-job as a Linux systems administrator. I’m looking forward to experiencing this for my third year in a row.