What to Expect at Austin’s Open Source Summit 2022

The Linux Foundation’s premiere North American event is scheduled to be staged June 21-24 in Austin, Texas. The event will also be live streamed for viewing at home.

The 2022 conference season is arriving, and it looks like this year most events are planning on going live and in-person. Time will tell if Covid is going to continue to let that happen.

Open Source Summit North America, the extravaganza event sponsored by the Linux Foundation, just announced the lineup for the North America leg of its world tour, which this year will happen in Texas, inside the Austin City Limits at the JW Marriott Austin, June 21-24. All in all there will be 18 tracks, except the Linux Foundation doesn’t call them tracks. Each track is its own mini conference, according to their dictionary.

They do this at all of their conferences — like KubeCon + Cloud Native Con. The biggest advantage for them, probably, is that it allows them to keep the LinuxCon name alive, for those of us who still gripe about losing one of our favorite events to Open Source Summit.

As usual, the centerpiece of Open Source Summit will be Dirk Hohndel’s interview of Linus Torvalds, the creator of both Linux and Git, which will be presented as a keynote on Tuesday June 21, the first full day of the event. The Linux and Dirk show is scheduled to take place at 10:10 a.m. Central Daylight Time (11:10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time/8:10 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time).

Although the event bills itself as a four day event, for all practical purposes it really covers three days and opens on Tuesday. Monday is basically a way for attendees who have arrived in Austin early to meet with people and take care of registration issues. There are a few specialized items on the schedule for Monday, however, including a couple of mini summits that come with an additional fee and require pre-registration.

Monday also offers a Kids’ Day that starts at noon (pre-registration required), a screening of “Mama Bears,” a LGBTQ-focused documentary at 4:30 p.m., and a Better Together Diversity Social starting at 6:30 p.m.

In keeping with tradition, after Tuesday morning’s “Welcome and Announcements” keynote, Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation’s executive director, will open the show with his annual “State of the Union” presentation.

It total, more than 300 presentations are scheduled to follow over the next three days.

Keynote Speakers

As usual, the Linux Foundation has pulled out all stops to bring top shelf speakers to the stage to deliver keynotes. On Tuesday, shoehorned between Zemlin and Torvalds will be talks from Eric Brewer, VP of infrastructure at Google, and Amy Gilliland, the president at General Dynamics Information Technology. Brewer’s talk, “The Consequence of Success: OSS is Critical Infrastructure,” will focus on responsibility and trust. Nothing has been released about Gilliland’s planned address yet, which likely means we can expect a product announcement.

Other keynote speakers for the event include Melissa Smolensky, VP of corporate marketing at GitLab, who will be looking back on the last 10 years in open source, and Chris Wright, Red Hat’s CTO, who will be talking about open source in the automotive sector.

The full schedule of keynotes, presentations, and workshops is available on the events website.

Covid Safety Precautions and Registration

As with other Linux Foundation events during the pandemic, those attending Open Source Summit will be required to be fully vaccinated against Covid-19 and will need to comply with all on-site health measures. For further information, the foundations suggests visiting its Health & Safety webpage.

How much you pay to attend the event will depend on when you register, but no matter what, it’s not going to be cheap. Right now there’s an early bird special that’ll get you in for $850, which will go up to $1,000 next Wednesday. For those who wait until June 1 or later, the price goes up to $1,250. Considerably lower prices are available for those who qualify for Academic, Hobbyist, or Small Business rates.

The event will also be available online, with access requiring a $25 registration.

Christine Hall

Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux

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