SCALE 22x (Southern California Linux Expo)
SCaLE 22x – the 22nd Annual Southern California Linux Expo – will take place on March 6-9, 2025 at the Pasadena Convention Center in Pasadena, CA.
SCaLE is the largest community-run open-source and free software conference in North America. It is held annually in the greater Los Angeles area.
Who’s Onboard?
Speakers and presentations have been announced for Scale 22x, and it looks like this one will be one for the record books.
Not only will there be plentyof familiar names and faces giving presentations — as well as plenty of fresh new blood, which is always a good thing — there are also going to be a few open-source legends on the scene.
Notable in that regard would be Jon ‘maddog’ Hall, who was practicing open source long before open source had been officially invented. Since starting his computing career in 1969, Hall has been a programmer, systems designer, systems administrator, product manager, technical marketing manager, author, and educator. During that time he collected paychecks from Western Electric, Aetna Life, Bell Laboratories, Digital Equipment, VA Linux Systems… the list goes on and on.
These days he’s the board chair emeritus of the Linux Professional Institute, and at Scale 22x he’ll be giving a talk called The JOY of Free Software: It Should Be Fun to Fish. About the talk, Hall said, “The Linux Foundation does a pretty good job with the needs of corporations. Now we need to make FOSS fun for the average person again.”
That’s pretty much the way we feel at FOSS Force.
Also on the schedule is Mark Hinkle, who’s mainly known these days for the work he’s doing in AI, which includes being a co-founder of All Things Open AI, the new big tent AI event that’ll be having it’s inaugural run in March. At Scale, Hinkle will be giving a talk called Crash Course in Open Source Generative AI. “Attendees will leave better equipped to navigate the GenAI landscape and deploy open source enterprise solutions for generative AI,” Hinkle said.
Other people giving presentations whose names many open sourcers will recognize include Bradley Kuhn, policy fellow and hacker-in-residence at Software Freedom Conservancy, who’ll be melding open source with the maker movement in a talk called Copyleft and the GPL: Finding the Path Forward to Defend our Software Right to Repair. Also on hand will be Kyle Rankin to talk about Nextcloud; Carl Richell, the CEO of System76 who’ll be introducing Pop!_OS’s new Cosmic DE; benny Vasquez, who keeps AlmaLinux running smoothly; and Tarus Balog, who these days is open source strategist at AWS, but who founded The OpenNMS Group in 2001 and ran it until 2021.
All in all, we count just shy of 200 speakers scheduled to give close to the same number of presentations.
A complete list of speakers and a complete list of presentations are available here.
Colocated Events, and What Can I Do?
The folks at Scale call it a “stacked schedule,” we call it seven. Whatever you want to call it, there will be a number of colocated events happening alongside Scale 22x. A full list is available here, but by the end of the first week in 2025 we hope to have a listing up on this calendar for each and every one, so keep an eye out for that.
Volunteer! Interested in helping to plan and/or to volunteer for SCALE 22x? Get in touch by either filling out this form or sending us an email at staff@socallinuxexpo.org.
Attend! Register to attend the conference. Expo is open Friday – Sunday. Talks and workshops are Thursday – Sunday.
Sponsor! Sponsorship and exhibitor opportunities are available for commercial and non-profit exhibitors. Email us for details.
Stay! Discounted room blocks at local hotels are available!
