The Linux Foundation (LF) announced it will co-host a conference in Beijing, China this winter. Set for February 19-20 in Beijing, the Chinese OSS Promotion Union's “Linux Developer Symposium” includes an embedded and mobile Linux track, and presentations from kernel developers Matt Mackall, Jonathan Corbet, and Andrew Morton.

Modeled after the LF's Japanese Symposia, the Beijing event is intended to encourage cross-collaboration among Linux kernel developers and local developers, and motivate Chinese developers to increase their involvement in Linux kernel development. The Symposium covers all things Linux, including desktop and server applications, as well as mobile and embedded Linux.

The speaker list includes:

• Jonathan Corbet — LWN.net executive editor, and co-author of Linux Device Drivers
• Coly Li — Novell file system maintainer
• Matt Mackall — Principle developer of CELF, currently working on improved memory visibility patches
• Andrew Morton — Linux kernel maintainer, who spoke about embedded Linux recently
• Dave Neary — GNOME Foundation Linux developer
• Glenn Seiler — Wind River exec and former chairman of LF's Carrier Grade Linux working group
• Jim Zemlin — executive director, The Linux Foundation

Stated Lu Shouqun, Chairman of China OSS Promotion Union (COPU), “Chinese companies and government are strongly supportive of open source development. Many successful software IPOs this year in China were built with open source software.”

COPU boasts some 300 members, says the LF, representing over 200 Chinese universities, various research institutes and industry organizations, and all the Chinese Linux distributions, including Red Flag, Co-Create, China Standard Soft, TurboLinux, and Sun Wah. The membership also includes 20 multinational companies, including IBM, Intel, HP, Sun, Oracle, SAP, NEC, CA, BEA, Hitachi, Sybase, France Telecom, MontaVista, and Google.

According to the Linux Foundation, which formed earlier this year with the merger of the Open Source Development Lab (OSDL) and the Free Standards Group, Linux has been growing quickly in China. Government agencies using Linux include the National Ministry of Science, Ministry of Information Industry, Ministry of Education, the Ministry of Statistics, and the National Labor Unit, China Post, says the LF. The local Beijing government is said to be using 2,000 Linux desktops, and the Chinese government plans to install more than 140,000 Linux PCs in primary and secondary schools in Jiangsu province.

Availability

The Linux Developer Symposium will be held on February 19-20 at the Park Plaza Beijing Science Park. More information is available at the COPU site or the LF site.

 
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