You were warned: I wrote on Wednesday that it would be a good idea to get your badges at the Hampton Inn at game night…
FOSS Force
FOSS Week in Review
Larry’s hanging out up near the 49th parallel, in Bellingham, Washington, for the LinuxFest Northwest conference. He’ll be filing reports over the weekend and possibly on Monday, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, I get to do the Week in Review — because the boss likes me best.
OSCON’s packing its bags
Speaking of conferences, OSCON’s making a big move. Although the annual conference presented by publisher O’Reilly Media started in my old stomping grounds of Monterey, California in 1999, the event has been held in Portland, Oregon every year since 2003, except for 2009 when it made a one-off stop in San Jose. This year OSCON will once again be held in Portland, on July 20-24, then that’s it, for at least a year.
Late last week, Rachel Roumeliotis reported in a blog on the OSCON website that after this year’s event, the conference will be packing up and making a move. In 2016, OSCON will unfold it’s tents in Austin, Texas, with the conference being held May 16=20.
Why Austin? Cited for reasons are the city’s many software communities, such as All Girl Hack Night and Google Development Group Austin, as well as Texas based tech firms such as Rackspace, Dell, SoftLayer, Continuum, and OpenStack. It doesn’t look like this move will be permanent, however. According to the post: “As with OSCON in Amsterdam…we want to explore these communities and offer those software engineers and architects the OSCON experience.”
Today’s the day that Canonical will release the stable version of Ubuntu 15.04, also known under the human readable name Vivid Vervet.
Like it or not, during the second decade of the 21st century Ubuntu has been the operating system to watch. This, despite the fact that its gathered a large base of followers who loyally despise it. While it’s true that much of this animosity is deserved, just as much is because we love to hate a big shot, and our jealousy over the success of others is made worse when success comes to those who don’t act according to our plans.
This would definitely describe Ubuntu. From it’s exchange of GNOME for Unity to it’s dropping Wayland for Mir, Canonical doesn’t seem to march to anyone’s orders but its own, something that’s been true since day one.
Perhaps we see that with the continuation of the Ubuntu desktop.
By now, we might expect that in the name of profitability, Ubuntu would be making plans to drop its desktop to concentrate solely on servers and the cloud, where money is undoubtedly easier to make. This is the path forged by Red Hat and SUSE, both of which long ago quit developing mainstream desktop editions in favor of “community developed” distros, which are mainly testing grounds for their respective enterprise stacks. Ubuntu doesn’t seem to be interested in going that route — not yet, anyway.
Why? Because the desktop fits neatly into Canonical’s plans.
Sure there’s a lot going on right now: A report posted on the OSCON site this week has the show — which everyone assumed would be in Portland forever — moving to Austin and being rescheduled to May in 2016. Let’s call that AusCON from here on in.
Then there’s the release of Ubuntu 15.04, complete with the adjective and animal beginning with the same letter — Vivid Vervet this time around.
But what’s more important than those two items at the moment — we can deal with those later — is that LinuxFest Northwest is ramping up its 15th annual show in Bellingham, Washington, this week.
LinuxFest Northwest — just south of the border (the Canadian one, that is) — is like Old Man River: It just keeps rolling along. Shows come and go, they grow and move, but the oldest community-run expo has put down some solid roots at Bellingham Technical College. The show has grown over the years, and so has the college. With recent improvements over the last few years, LFNW has grown to be a top-notch destination for speakers, exhibitors and attendees, with around 80 presentations being part and parcel of LFNW’s weekend fare.
The title? Oh, This Is How It Works? Yeah, because this is how it works. Working together in collaboration. Leaving your ego and your bias at the door. Kicking off your shoes and joining a group already assembled. Opening your mind to new and possibly better things that you bring to the table. This is how it works.
Changing someone’s world.
Changing a lot of someone’s world for that matter. Changing lives for a great and a new day…a great and new day for just them. A change that allows them to do things that physical inability restricted them from doing before now.
Not doing it for the few minutes your name and face will be on some website, or for a mention on the front page of a big city newspaper. Also, not doing it for money.
No, what you are doing is joining others with many of the same values, talents and dreams. People who are working not for their own but for someone else’s future…someone you and they will probably never know or even meet. They are half a world away and not dreaming that in just a few hours someone else is going to fix something broken within them. And they’re doing this fixing simply because they have the ability to do it.
Last week in Columbia, South Carolina, the developers’ conference POSSCON went through something of a reboot. Last year the conference was cancelled to allow It-oLogy, the organization behind the event, to put its energy behind launching the Great Wide Open conference in Atlanta. This year, with last year’s successful premiere of the Hotlanta event under its belt, IT-oLogy pulled-out all the stops to reestablish POSSCON.
Putting a popular conference on hold for a year could easily have proved to be a big mistake, especially since POSSCON takes place in IT-oLogy’s hometown. Not to fear, however, as the crowds returned, like the swallows to Capistrano, to Columbia’s Vista district where the conference is held.
FOSS Week in Review
Death and taxes: I avoided the first and completed the second. Metric tons of thanks to Christine Hall for standing in for me while I was recovering from what seemed for awhile there to be a terminal case of the flu as well as an appointment to do paperwork for our friendly Internal Revenue Service.
The best news of the week, of course, is that we’re everywhere. Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols wrote a story in ZDNet yesterday reporting on the results of the ninth annual Future of Open Source Survey. There’s an upside and a downside, as Steven reports: Enterprise is adopting open source like crazy, but they’re not managing it worth a darn.
About six weeks ago I told you about Symple PC, the new $89 PC preinstalled with Ubuntu. Now I’ve had a chance to take one for a test drive. The verdict? Just like I figured, it’s a good deal. After all, the price is nothing if not sweet, especially considering that these machines come with a one year full replacement warranty.
Diane and I were watching the Austin local news two weeks ago and one of the features was about a guy who made 60K a…
Anyone who runs sites using the WordPress platform and the plugin Simple Ads Manager will want to read this and learn from our mistake. Even those not using this particular plugin, but who have deactivated plugins not being used but still residing on their servers might find this useful. Luckily, in our case no harm was done, but that’s only because the incident occurred on a test site, so we were able to just take the site down. Lucky for us, it wasn’t FOSS Force or one of our other active sites.
Early Saturday evening we began receiving numerous email notices with two worrisome subject lines from our server. One subject was “LOCALRELAY Alert for sitename,” being sent to us at the rate of about every five minutes, with each showing info on the “first ten of 101 emails” that had been sent by the server since the last email notification. The other subject, “Script Alert for /path/to/script” was coming with the same frequency. To make a long story short, someone had hacked into a site we use to evaluate and test WordPress plugins before possibly deploying them on active sites, and was using it to send spam. Our test site had been turned into a spambot in other words.