The Linux Foundation (LF) announced a “LinuxCon” conference that will be open to end-users. Set for September 2009 in Portland, Ore., LinuxCon will co-locate with the annual Linux Plumbers Conference (LPC), says the group, which also announced that next April's Collaboration Summit will be co-located with the embedded “CELF” conference.

The LinuxCon announcement follows up on The LF's first end-user event, which is scheduled to take place on October 13-14 in New York City. This Linux Foundation End User Collaboration Summit offers an opportunity for “sophisticated” end users to “learn and interact with leaders from within the Linux community, including the highest level maintainers and developers,” said the non-profit organization.

Next year's LinuxCon conference, however, apparently requires no badge of sophistication, and offers sessions, tutorials, keynotes, mini-summits, and a technology showcase. The show will include a paper-based technical conference on topics such as mobile, desktop, and embedded applications.

Unlike LF's invitation-only Kernel Summits and Collaboration Summits, which are targeted at major kernel maintainers, developers, technology manufacturers, and corporate sponsors, LinuxCon will be more inclusive and produced more “in the spirit of open source development,” says the LF.

Linux developers will benefit from hearing feedback directly from the user community, says the LF, and end users can learn about the latest technical Linux advances from some of the top developers and maintainers in the community. With the highly techie LPC happening simultaneously in the same location, leading developers will be actively contributing, promises the non-profit group.

Embedded CELF show gets embedded

Saving a plane ride or two for leading embedded Linux developers, the LF also announced that its next Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, scheduled for April 8 -10, 2009 in San Francisco, will be co-located with the CELF (Consumer Electronics Linux Forum) Embedded Linux Conference, as well as the Linux Storage and Filesystem Workshop.

Held in Mountain View, Calif. in April, this year's CELF featured 54 sessions, six BOFs (birds of a feather) sessions, and a major address by Andrew Morton on the need to create an a full-time, architecture-independent “embedded maintainer” position. He was so compelling in his argument that the Linux community promptly hired two embedded maintainers.

Jim Zemlin

LF Executive Director Jim Zemlin (pictured) says “LinuxCon will be where the best and the brightest from the Linux community share their knowledge with papers-based conference sessions, passionate discussions, and hands-on technical sessions. This is not a top-down, for-profit conference controlled by a commercial entity. This is for the community, by the community.”

Stated Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, community manager, openSUSE, “LinuxCon will meet a crucial need for the community. We don't have a single forum where Linux contributors and users can collaborate on real issues at every level.”

The LF also announced that next year's Kernel Summit will be held in Tokyo from October 18-20, 2009, and will be co-located with the new Linux Foundation Tokyo Symposium. More information about LinuxCon and other 2009 Linux Foundation events may be available here.

 
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