Now that the mega-conference week that was is in the books — Ohio LinuxFest, All Things Open and Seattle GNU/Linux Conference are all history for this year — generally the Linux/FOSS world catches its collective breath and starts thinking about shows in 2015.
But wait. There’s one more event that deserves special mention before we close out the year. For those of you who are on the BSD side of the FOSS street, Meet BSD California 2014 takes place this weekend in San Jose at the offices of Western Digital.
A biennial tradition in the San Francisco Bay Area, MeetBSD 2014 uses a mixed unConference format featuring both scheduled talks and community-driven events such as birds-of-a-feather meetings, lightning talks, and speed geeking sessions. MeetBSD can be traced back to a local workshop for BSD developers and users, hosted annually in Poland since 2004. Since then, MeetBSD’s popularity has spread, and it’s now widely recognized as its own conference with participants from all over the world.
Looking ahead to next year, LCA2015 — that’s linux.conf.au for those of you keeping score at home, the first-of-the-year worldwide Linux conference once took place at venues in Australia and now moves next door to New Zealand. Held in Auckland on Jan. 12-16, 2015, LCA2015 draws open source speakers from around the world — a large contingent from North America — to kick off the year with a star-studded cast of speakers. Currently the schedule is not yet set, but we’ll keep you posted in future dispatches when that is finalized.
A month later, in February, SCALE 13x gets underway at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport hotel on the Thursday before Presidents Day weekend, growing to a four-day event starting in 2015.
As the first-of-the-year Linux/FOSS expo in North America, SCALE 13x expects to host more than 100 exhibitors this year, along with nearly 130 sessions, tutorials, and special events starting on Thursday, Feb. 19 and running through Sunday, Feb. 22. Held annually in Los Angeles, SCALE is the largest community-run FOSS conference in North America. The Call for Papers ends in just over 40 days, so — as one programmer friend put it — you have just over 39 more days to procrastinate. But you will be well advised not to, since there are many good proposals being submitted as you read this.
After that, the rest of the Linux/FOSS expo year gets underway. If you have a show that’s within a day’s travel of your home, you should definitely attend.
Larry Cafiero, a.k.a. Larry the Free Software Guy, is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate. He is involved in several FOSS projects and serves as the publicity chair for the Southern California Linux Expo. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero
