April 26, 2025
Keeping tech free
Whew. It had over 140 exhibitors, and over 185 sessions. It had just north of 3,600 people registered for the event. It had four days of peace, love and FOSS.
That was SCALE 14X.
But we’re getting ahead of Sunday’s story.
After the cacophony of Saturday night’s Weakest Geek — Ruth Suehle won her third, with talk of a dynasty in the air for that particular game — and the fun and games of, well, Game Night, Sunday rolled into Pasadena on a more quiet, thoughtful note.
Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls — that covers most of you: From a press standpoint, to say that SCALE 14X was busy would be a clear understatement. While the event has pretty much ratcheted itself up to the next level, staying atop the show in my capacity as the publicity chair is somewhat daunting.
So rather than tell you what happened today, I’m just going to show you. You’ll thank me for it later, trust me.
POSSCON has been cancelled. The surprise announcement was made Thursday by way of an email from IT-oLogy, the nonprofit organization which hosts the event. The conference, which focuses on the enterprise and is targeted at IT professionals who develop or use open source software, was scheduled to be held in Columbia, S.C. on April 12-13.
This is the second time in three years that IT-oLogy’s longest running conference has been cancelled. In 2014 the event was cancelled, evidently due to logistical problems as IT-oLogy was in the process of launching the first Great Wide Open conference in Atlanta. Last year there was no Atlanta event, and POSSCON was successfully rebooted in Columbia, attracting around 850 atendees.
One of the fears — one of the many in having an established conference at a brand spanking new venue — is this: Suppose they gave an outstanding Friday keynote, and nobody came? All those sleepless nights worrying about it were essentially for naught, since Cory Doctorow’s keynote at SCALE 14X Friday was a standing room only success.
The keynote kicked off yet another day of SCALE at its new digs, and the Pasadena Convention Center has gotten high marks among attendees. The wide-open exhibit hall, holding 143 exhibitors, was a complete hit with both attendees and vendors alike.
We’re just barely past the relatively quiet news days that are the holiday season and already the news is getting to be quite contentious. So much so that I’ve been tempted to call this edition of the Week in Review “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” but I’m afraid that might turn into some kind of trademark dispute. I am reminded by our opening story, however, of the old Pogo quip from the funny pages: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”
Linux Foundation adopts plantation model: The biggest FOSS story this week came on Wednesday when free software activist and Linux kernel developer Matthew Garrett made public that on last Friday the Linux Foundation had dropped community representation from its board.
The Linux Foundation’s board has always been weighted heavily in favor of corporations and money, with a large majority of the foundation’s board being elected by member corporations. The nine platinum members, who each pay $500,000 yearly in membership dues, elect up to ten board members (or one each for up to ten directors), the sixteen gold members elect three, and the more than 250 silver members elect only one. Until last week, individual members, who pay $99 in annual dues, elected two members to the board, not enough to influence foundation policy in a vote, but enough to give the community some say in the decision making process.
Not any longer.
One of the drawbacks of having to work a show like SCALE is that I don’t get to go to enough sessions while I’m here. As the traffic cop at the intersection of old and new media, it’s my job to marshal the publicity team’s forces into taking the information happening at the show and then processing it for the wider public consumption.
Admin, Community, Distros, News and Operating Systems
Starting today, the Southern California Linux Expo — SCALE 14X in this year’s 14th annual iteration — moves from being hotel-based event busting at the seams to hold all the exhibitors and sessions to being a full-fledged, freewheeling convention center-based event with wide-open spaces and widespread talks.
The setup is done for today, with exhibitors readying their booths for the opening of the floor tomorrow after Cory Doctorow gives his Friday keynote. But let’s not get ahead of the story for Thursday.
The schedule is posted online, if you’re at the event. If not, you can still follow along at the link.
It’s been maybe two years ago, maybe three; that I was involved in a community discussion of charitable works. It stemmed from a topic I covered on my Blog of Helios and while we discussed the various means that we could be of service to others not so fortunate, one individual sought to find a way out of the discussion. “Well, I don’t know any poor people.”
Huh. He doesn’t know any poor people he says. Well “what a coincidence”, I told him. “Neither did I until I started looking for them.” That was the last I saw or heard from said person, and it’s all for the better. We didn’t seem to have much in common.
The voting is all done for the second round of our poll to decide which GNU/Linux distro our readers would choose to receive our “Reader’s Choice Best Linux Distro” award for 2015. As in round one, Arch Linux won the day. The poll results are considered to be more a measure of a distro’s community support than any indication of a distro’s technical merits.
The first round of our poll was a qualifying round, which Arch won as well, racking up 1,376 votes. The second round of voting was “winner take all,” and with the voting lighter than in the first round, Arch still managed to put together 592 votes. In all, 2,625 votes were cast in round two, which was active for seven days.
