The Linux Foundation announced keynote speakers and panels for LinuxCon, scheduled for August 10-12 in Boston. The show will feature keynote speakers including Virgin America's Ravi Simhambhatla, GNOME's Stormy Peters, the SFLC's Eben Moglen, and Forrester's Jeffrey S. Hammond, and hosts a Linux Kernel Roundtable with Ted T'so and other kernel insiders.

LinuxCon debuted last September in Portland, Oregon, as a larger, more open alternative to the Linux Foundation's invitation-only Collaboration Summit, which was recently held in San Francisco. It aims to bring together technical and business leadership across the Linux spectrum, including desktop, enterprise, kernel, and embedded development, the nonprofit Linux advocacy organization says.

(Before we continue, note that early bird registration ends tomorrow, so decisive types should hit the link at the end of the story to save themselves $100.)

Last year's conference featured speakers including Linus Torvalds, Joe Brockmeier, Jon Corbet, James Bottomley, and Greg Kroah-Hartman, and Mark Shuttleworth, among others.  For this year's second annual LinuxCon event, noted kernel insiders Bottomley and Corbet are once again featured in the Linux Kernel Roundtable, along with other luminaries like Ted T'so (pictured).

Yet, LinuxCon also features some keynote speakers from outside the tux bubble, offering a big picture view of the growing role of Linux around the world.

LinuxCon will be preceded by several community mini-summits on Aug. 9, says the LF. The current line-up of mini-summits is said to include a KVM Forum, Linux Storage and Filesystems Workshop, Xen Directions, Linux Security Summit, Bluetooth Summit, Power Management Summit, and Tracing Summit.

Confirmed keynote presenters for this year's LinuxCon are said to include:

• Ravi Simhambhatla, VP and CIO, Virgin America — Simhambhatla will explain how he sold Linux and open source to internal colleagues at San Francisco-based domestic airline and how Virgin is maximizing the software today.
• Eben Moglen, founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) — Moglen will discuss legal defense strategies for Linux and open source software projects, and provides an update on GPLv2 and GPLv3 adoption. (Question from the peanut gallery: What GPLv3 adoption?)

  

• Stormy Peters, executive director of the GNOME Foundation — Peters (pictured) will explore how data is being stored and accessed in the cloud, and what that means for Linux and open source.
• Jeffrey S. Hammond, principal analyst, Forrester Research — Hammond will present recent data that shows increased developer adoption of open source platforms, frameworks, and development processes, as well as heightened awareness by IT management of the benefits of a mixed source development model.

LinuxCon will feature the Linux Kernel Roundtable, where attendees can get a glimpse from kernel maintainers and other insiders of what's going on with the Linux kernel. (More questions from the peanut gallery: is Linux really getting too bloated, as suggests Mr. Torvalds, and are these new Phoronix benchmarks to be believed, concluding that Windows 7 is faster and less power-hungry than Ubuntu 10.04?)

Speakers for the Linux Kernel Roundtable include:

• James Bottomley — Novell distinguished engineer and Linux kernel maintainer of the SCSI subsystem, the Linux Voyager port, and the 53c700 driver
• Jon Corbet — Linux kernel developer and editor, Linux Weekly News (LWN)
• Dave Jones — Fedora kernel maintainer
• Chris Mason — director of Linux kernel engineering at Oracle and creator of the Btrfs file system
• Ted Ts'o — North America's first kernel developer and fellow at Google (pictured farther above)

LinuxCon is supported this year by platinum sponsors HP, IBM, Intel and Novell, as well as and bronze sponsors Canonical, NetApp, and SoftLayer Technologies.

Stated Jim Zemlin, the LF's executive director, "The LinuxCon keynotes and panels represent the Linux ecosystem and its major insiders — from the developer, business, operations and legal communities.

Availability

LinuxCon is scheduled for August 10-12 in Boston at the Renaissance Boston Waterfront. Early bird registration ($300) closes tomorrow, May 6, after which the price moves to $400. More registration information may be found here, and more on the mini-summits should be here.

This article was originally published on LinuxDevices.com and has been donated to the open source community by QuinStreet Inc. Please visit LinuxToday.com for up-to-date news and articles about Linux and open source.