February 21, 2026
Keeping tech free
It’s time for our annual “What’s Your Distro” poll, to determine who gets the FOSS Force Best Distro Award for 2015. This year we’re pulling out all the stops. We want this one to be a metaphoric old fashioned slug fest that will be played until only one distro is standing.
First, let me thank those who took the time to alert me last week to the agreement between Red Hat and Microsoft on holding hands in the cloud. All the concern shown in the emails and social media posts were completely welcome, and could be broken up into two basic sentiments: curiosity about my reaction and serving me some crow to eat.
But on the whole, let’s not make this Red Hat/Microsoft agreement into a bigger deal than it actually is.
It has been a busy week in the FOSS world, with a lot of buzz about developments in the larger sectors of the FOSS realms. So let’s jump in, shall we?
Linux Foundation looks to Open APIs: After corralling the widely divergent world of containers, the Linux Foundation now sets its sights on the API economy and making application program interfaces, or APIs, easier to find, according to a report from InfoWorld. For the uninitiated, open APIs, sometimes called public APIs, describes an application program interface providing developers with programmatic access to a proprietary software application.
It has been a busy couple of weeks for Ansible, a provider of powerful automation solutions designed to help enterprises move toward frictionless IT.
First, Red Hat acquires Ansible two weeks ago, which is both no small feat and a coup for the folks in Raleigh. The acquisition was a smart, yet expected, move: It marries Ansible’s ease of automation to the wide portfolio of Red Hat clientele, driving down the cost and complexity of deploying and managing both cloud-native and traditional applications across hybrid cloud environments. In short, by writing a check, Red Hat expanded its leadership in hybrid cloud management.
In addition, related to the purchase or not, Ansible has also started getting some traction at this week’s OpenStack Summit in Tokyo this week, and as that show progresses we will see where Red Hat will guide its new acquisition.
Last week I told you about a few of the more than 130 speakers scheduled for this year’s All Things Open (ATO) conference in Raleigh, to be held October 19-20. Today, we’ll talk about the impressive lineup of keynote speakers who’re on tap this year.
Actually, it’s something of a miracle that the event is still good-to-go. IT-oLogy, the organization behind ATO, is headquartered in Columbia, S.C., which was subject to massive flooding last week in the wake of hurricane Joaquin. In fact, the organizations headquarters are located only blocks away from the Congaree River, the source of much flooding.
Thankfully, the organization’s infrastructure came through just fine, according to Todd Lewis, who is both the chair person for ATO and IT-oLogy’s Executive Director-Columbia.
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
Highlighting the week’s activities in the FOSS realm is, say it with me, money. You know, the thing that we all want but that most of us never have enough of. Some have it and some need it — making it a good thing we’re about to tell you who is who with this weekend’s wrap up.
Open FOSS Training Indiegogo Campaign: Back home again in Indiana — Martinsville, Indiana, to be exact — Matthew Williams has taken the baton and is running with it when it comes to training folks in the use of free/open source software, or what we lovingly refer to as FOSS.
Community, Gaming, News and Operating Systems
First things first: When the sun comes up on a sleepy little town down around San Antone, it’ll mark the start of Texas Linux Fest, the sixth annual two-day Linux/FOSS hoedown deep in the heart of the Lone Star State, this year about halfway between Austin and San Antonio. Lots of great speakers with lots of great sponsors give this show a more local feel than the one earlier this week in the Pacific Northwest, so if you’re in the neighborhood, you should give the fest a visit.
ThinkPad aficionados, are you ready?
While both bending the language and changing definitions of hardware on the fly, Lenovo announced on Tuesday the Lenovo ThinkPad P50 and P70, the new ThinkPad hardware to be available in Q4.
But first, let’s set things straight: The ThinkPad is no longer a laptop, according to the Lenovo press release. The first paragraph of the press release says the company “unveiled the beginning of a new family of mobile workstation innovations.” So I guess that’s what we’re calling them now – mobile workstations.
Anyway, the new ThinkPad P70 comes with the most memory and storage ever found in a laptop…sorry, a mobile workstation. Namely, maxing out at 64GB of DDR4 ECC memory and with the ability to handle up to four storage devices and up to a terabyte of SSD storage. It also utilizes the latest PCIe technology for speeds up to five times faster than current SATA technology. But wait, there’s more: The ThinkPad P70 “comes with two Intel ThunderboltTM 3 ports for ultra-fast connectivity and a 4K UHD display or optional FHD touch,” according to the release.
It’s been a busy week for those in the FOSS realm — from sea-to-shining-sea, and even down South — with the Red Hat Summit going on in Boston, with Open Source Bridge in Portland, Oregon, and with preparations being finalized for the upcoming Texas Linux Fest in two months, among other things.
Let’s take these one at a time, shall we?
Red Hat, Samsung Team Up: While there has been a lot of oooh-ing and ahhh-ing over what’s been coming out of the Red Hat Summit in Boston this week, probably the most intriguing news to come out of the proceedings is that Red Hat and Samsung Electronics America “announced a strategic alliance to deliver the next generation of mobile solutions for the enterprise,” according to Red Hat’s PR department.
Sarah Sharp, an embedded software architect at Intel, and Kesha Shah, a student at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology, were named the winners of Red Hat’s first Women in Open Source Awards at the Red Hat Summit in Boston on Tuesday.
The Women in Open Source Awards recognize women in two categories – Community and Academic – who make important contributions to open source projects and communities, or who promote open source methodologies.
