Ubucon Slated for SCALE 14X, Bassel Offered MIT Job & More…

FOSS Week in Review

I don’t say enough good things about Ubuntu, so when they give me reason to, I’m on it. I also don’t talk enough about openSUSE either; good, bad or indifferent. Not that I’m turning over a new leaf or anything, but this week’s wrap up contains two items about these distros, and more. Don’t just sit there: Read on&hellip.

Ubucon at SCALE 14X: SCALE 14X is pleased to announce that Ubucon, a network of conferences focusing on Ubuntu, will take place during the four-day expo at the Pasadena Convention Center.

Ubucon will take place on Jan 21-22, 2016. With Mark Shuttleworth giving the Ubucon keynote, the event will be structured as a traditional conference with presentations, demos and plenaries on the first day and as an unconference for the second one. There will also be two tracks grouping sessions by theme. The Users track is intended for those interested in learning about the non-tech, day-to-day part of using Ubuntu, as well as how to contribute to Ubuntu as an advocate. The Developers track will cover the sessions of interest to the amateur/professional developer, including topics like app development, IoT, convergence, cloud and more.

For more information on this, see David Planella’s blog.

Bassel Gets Research Position at MIT: While Bassel Khartabil Safadi is still imprisoned in Syria, the groundswell of support worldwide for his release systematically has been growing. One giant leap in this direction comes from our friends in Cambridge, Mass., at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When Bassel is freed, he has a post waiting for him at MIT, according to a blog post by Joi Ito of the Media Lab: research scientist in the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab.

“As a research scientist at the Media Lab, Bassel will be able to continue his longstanding work protecting spaces for online speech-work that fits naturally with the core research mission of the Center,” Ito wrote. “In particular, Bassel is currently working on reconstructing in 3D the ancient ruins of Palmyra, one of the sites raided and destroyed by ISIS.”

Now to get the Syrian government to let the man go: If you haven’t signed the petition already, it’s here.

OpenSUSE Takes a Leap: Occasional mentions of Bryan Lunduke aside, I’ll be the first to admit we probably don’t say say enough about openSUSE. But we’ll let The Register take the lead in talking about openSUSE’s new development — touted as the future of openSUSE — appropriately called openSUSE Leap.

Currently openSUSE Leap is in beta, with a core of SUSE Enterprise Linux containing applications maintained by openSUSE. According to the article, Leap “is the middle ground between the cutting edge Tumbleweed (the rolling release of openSUSE containing the latest stable version) and very conservative SUSE Linux Enterprise,” the article explains. “Tumbleweed will still be there for those who want bleeding edge updates, but for most Leap looks like the future of openSUSE.”

It looks like interesting days ahead for the lizards.

But Wait, There’s More: Speaking of SCALE 14x, you still have a week to submit a talk for the first-of-the-year Linux/FOSS show in the world (now before linux.conf.au and FOSDEM in 2016, by some stroke of scheduling luck). SCALE 14x is four days of Peace, Love and Linux at the Pasadena Convention Center from Jan. 21-24, 2016…Getting the computers to the kids is no easy feat, even when the truck is working: My good friend and FOSS Force colleague (not to mention Houston Astros fan) Ken Starks has an Indiegogo campaign to replace the now-deceased delivery vehicle for Reglue (Recycled Electronics and GNU/Linux Used for Education). Throw in a few bucks if you can.

See you Monday.

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