CFP Jam & LinuxFest Northwest Goes Hollywood

FOSS Week in Review

As we get ready for a wild weekend of Linux, barbecue and guns at SouthEast LinuxFest — and FOSS Force’s Christine Hall will be on the scene reporting from Charlotte — we should first go to our eye in the sky to see what the traffic is like during FOSS rush hour for presentation proposals.

CFP Jam: Yep, looking down from the FOSS Force traffic chopper, they’re bumper to bumper on the Call for Papers highway today in what can best be described as a rare CFP rush hour in the FOSS realm. In order of closing, down in the Lone Star State, Texas Linux Fest‘s CFP has a deadline looming on June 28, with the festivities at the San Marcos Convention Center is beautiful downtown San Marcos, Texas on Aug. 21-22. Then Ohio LinuxFest has a deadline of July 17, since OLF is held on Oct. 2-3 at the Greater Columbus Convention Center (begging the question, is there a Lesser Columbus Convention Center?) in downtown Columbus, Ohio. To add to the mix, the Southern California Linux Expo — that’s SCALE 14x in 2016 — is a month early in January this time around and, as such, the CFP was moved back and opened yesterday. Deadline for the SCALE 14x CFP is Oct. 30 for the Jan. 21-24, 2016, event at the Pasadena Convention Center.

So get those papers in to any and all of the shows mentioned above, and we’ll see you at each of them.

Lights, Camera, LFNW: Linux and FOSS make cameo appearances throughout the TV and film world, and lately we’ve been treated to the GNOME vs. KDE tête-à-tête in the USA Network’s pilot of a show called “Mr. Robot.” This scene piqued my interest enough to watch the pilot, which was a mix of downright scary and mildly interesting portrayals of tech types at various levels in the overt and covert tech-company hierarchy, wrapped in painfully mediocre dialog (why can’t Aaron Sorkin just write everything? Is that too much to ask?). SPOILER ALERT: The subtext of a psychologically wrecked, socially castrated hacker protagonist — the one using GNOME — is grating enough, but this stereotype is far and away eclipsed by the world domination seemingly at the fingertips of the suit using KDE, which he displayed at the end of the pilot. And we though it was Redmond seeking to take over the world when it’s really…KDE?

Bringing this tangent back to — what do you call it again? Oh yeah, reality — LinuxFest Northwest has had a brush with fame in the Michael Mann movie “Blackhat” which came out earlier this year. The protagonist in the movie, with his trusty Toshiba, has a stack of magazines next to his laptop and, lo and behold, one of those has to be a Linux magazine (I’m guessing Linux Pro, which ran full-page ads for Linux expos on a regular basis — but again, that’s a guess) because the back page ad is for LinuxFest Northwest. Of course, unless you are familiar with the ad, you may not recognize it, but for those who are observant can see the Linux totem associated with the Bellingham show.

At this point, I’ll just turn it over to Christine Hall, who will be reporting from SouthEast LinuxFest deep in the heart of the GNU/South. Take it away, Christine…

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