Day one of this year’s SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) was kind of slow, without the bone crushing crowds I expect to see at an open source conference. However, talking with the go-to person at SELF, Jeremy Sands, I understand that this is normal for this conference. It seems that Charlotte is a city with a strong work ethic, keeping the crowd away until the weekend. Still, nearly five hundred in attendance isn’t deserving of sneers — especially on a “slow” day.
Somehow I managed to get up on time to make the hour and a half trip from my house to the Charlotte area in plenty of time for the 9 A.M. opening, groggy from only getting about three hours sleep, then wondered why I bothered arriving early. After all, the first presentation I planned to attend wasn’t until 11:30, and with no keynote address scheduled for Friday morning, that left me with a lot of time on my hands.
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
Newer converts to open source probably don’t know much about the site, but it wasn’t long ago when Linux users were very aware of SourceForge and how to use the service, at least well enough to download software — perhaps more aware than they wanted to be. It was the go-to site when looking for a program not available in a particular distro’s repository. Not anymore. Not for a while. These days, the more important projects have either migrated to GitHub or are hosting their own.
At the height of the media frenzy that developed around Snowden’s initial revelations, there were allegations that Microsoft had not only built back doors in its software for the NSA and other government agencies to use against foreign businesses and governments, but that it was cooperating with U.S. authorities in other ways as well. For example, one report indicated that the company was passing along details of unpatched security vulnerabilities in Windows to the NSA, effectively adding temporary tools to the spy agency’s cyber arsenal.
The best news of the week, of course, is that we’re everywhere. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote a 
SCO started out here in my neighborhood, essentially, in Santa Cruz, California. It was called The Santa Cruz Operation (hence, SCO). That manifestation of SCO was founded in 1979 by Larry and Doug Michels, a father and son, as a Unix porting and consulting company which, over time, developed its own brand of Unix. In his book “The Art of Unix Programming,” Eric Raymond calls SCO the “first Unix company.”
Well, guess what? This sort of targeting is coming to your TV soon.