Linux Luminaries Paint a Bright Future at LinuxCon

by Sean Michael Kerner

Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, delivered his annual State of Linux address at LinuxCon. One of the key items the Linux Foundation is working on is helping to scale the legal resources that are needed for Linux’s continued success, Zemlin told the audience.

Google’s director of open source, Chris DiBona, used the LinuxCon stage as the platform to talk about the history of the Android mobile operating system as an open-source effort.

A highlight of the event was the Linux kernel developers panel, which was anchored by Linux founder Linus Torvalds. “I don’t see any project coming along being more interesting to me than Linux,” Torvalds said. “I couldn’t imagine filling the void in my life if I didn’t have Linux.”

Dirk Hohndel, Intel’s chief Linux and open-source technologist, detailed during his LinuxCon keynote session why open source is important to Intel for development and the cloud. “This is not a charitable effort for us,” Hohndel said. “We want open source to design great projects and then have it run best on our hardware.”

Gabe Newell, co-founder of gaming giant Valve, explained during his keynote that his company uses Linux extensively on the back end for server infrastructure. He also made a bold prediction about what’s next and hinted at new Linux-powered gaming hardware to come from his company. “Linux is the future of gaming,” Newell said.

IBM Fellow and Vice President of Power Development Brad McCredie announced during the event that IBM is going to invest $1 billion into Linux development on its Power server systems.

Eben Upton, the executive director of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, told the LinuxCon audience that most people are used to buying computers in order to be users of software. The Raspberry Pi is a platform to enable people—and especially children—to be developers of software.

During the event, the OpenZFS effort was officially announced, providing a new common ground for Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Illumos operating system development. OpenZFS is the open-source version of Oracle’s ZFS storage filesystem.

Hewlett-Packard used the LinuxCon exhibit floor as the venue to showcase its latest Moonshot hyperscale server. HP recently announced that it will be supporting Intel’s latest Atom C2000 “Avoton” chips in the Moonshot server platform.

In a session at the conference, Lars Kurth, chairman of the Xen Project Advisory Board, detailed his project’s path from the edge of oblivion to once again being a prominent, well-respected and growing open-source technology. Xen is an open-source virtualization technology.

No LinuxCon conference would be complete without a party. This year the party was hosted at the legendary House of Blues in the French Quarter of New Orleans.