amcpherson's blog

Today we announced the full schedule for LinuxCon North America that will take place in Vancouver from August 17 - 19th. This year we had even more of a challenge than usual in putting together the program. Why? There were so many great submissions.

At The Linux Foundation, we are lucky to work directly with many of the most innovative companies in the world. We all know the big names like Google, IBM and Intel but as Linux use has expanded into new segments - especially in the embedded industry - we get to work with smaller, but no less innovative companies. The best part is helping them make the most of Linux by getting involved in the community. As an example, we recently completed software compliance  and community involvement training at set-to-box manufacturer Altech UEC.

Today we announced our keynote speaker line up for this year’s LinuxCon North America set in beautiful Vancouver, BC in August. I am especially proud of this year’s slate as I believe it captures the current Linux zeitgeist.

Enterprise Linux? We have the CEO of the largest and most successful Linux and open source company, Red Hat, opening up the conference.

Twenty years ago this summer, Linus Torvalds made a bold decision to share his operating system with the world. Not long after that, he chose to license it under the General Public License. Nothing in computing has been the same since.

In fact, today Linux is the largest collaborative development project in the history of computing, which means that the 20th Anniversary of Linux is an opportunity for the community to come together in celebration of this great success story and in collaboration on how it will define the next 20 years of Linux.

Valentine’s Day: chocolate hearts, love and super computers! At least this year my Valentine’s Day  will take a decidedly nerdy turn as I celebrate by watching the IBM Super Computer Watson compete on Jeopardy against two past champions. Creating a computer that can compete in a game show like this takes incredible technical achievement from many areas (from processors to understanding natural language).

Last week at CES, Microsoft announced their answer to the iPad with their tablet strategy. Computerworld says, “Microsoft has decided not to follow the Apple and Google route of putting its mobile operating system on tablets. Instead, Microsoft has chosen a more deliberate method where it will migrate its client OS onto tablets.” Microsoft also announced it will wait until its port of Windows 7 to ARM chips is complete.

We’ve talked a lot about the rise of Linux in embedded devices lately: from our embedded Linux training classes to the Yocto and Meego projects, to a new Linux Foundation fellow. But what about the end users, the people who are deploying Linux in their products?

Today we are pleased to publish annual report on Linux kernel development, detailing who does the work, who sponsors it and how fast the Linux kernel is growing.

The paper documents how hard at work the Linux community has been. There have been 1.5 million lines of code added to the kernel since the 2009 update.  Since that last paper, additions and changes translate  to an amazing 9,058 lines added, 4,495 lines removed, and 1,978 lines changed every day, ­ weekends and holidays included.

Those who follow Linux have certainly heard of Btrfs, a relatively new high performance file system that has a lot of people excited about its potential. Two months ago during LinuxCon Japan, we were pleased to sit down with lead developer Chris Mason from Oracle to record a short webinar that focuses on demonstrating RAID5 and RAID6 as well as recently completed features in Btrfs. This tutorial would be valuable to anyone interested in the technical details of the filesystem.

We’re pleased today to announce the results of a new publication from the Linux Foundation: a survey of enterprise users titled “Linux Adoption Trends: A Survey of Enterprise End Users.” We’re publishing it today at The Linux Foundation’s End User Summit.