2010 Linux Events Foster Community, Business Opportunities

The technology event season has come to a close, as the holidays approach and 2009 draws to its end.

This was a great year for events in the Linux community. Several regional Linux and open source shows filled the calendar around the world, so most Linux enthusiasts got a chance to visit at least one event near them. There were also the big shows, like OSCON, Open Source World, CeBIT, and, of course, LinuxCon, which came off as an unqualified success for the Linux Foundation.

So what’s kicking off for the first half of 2010 and beyond? Here’s a wish list of the events I want to attend:

• SCALE 8X, February 19-21, 2010, Westin Hotel near Los Angeles International Airport, Los Angeles, CA. This is one of my favorite community shows, and its importance in the Linux ecosystem cannot be underestimated. This is the community event that sets a bar for many of the other events to reach, with strong tracks for users and developers. Vendors and experts from Linux and open source deliver top-notch content, at a level that belies the “amateur” label one might put on a community-organized show. There’s nothing amateur about SCALE. They’re still looking for speakers, too, so visit their call for papers site and see what you can contribute.
• CeBIT 2010, Open Source Forum, March 2-6, 2010, Hanover, Germany. After the huge success of the open source agenda at last year’s CeBIT, the show organizers are giving it more room and a better location at the CeBIT exhibition grounds in 2010. The call for papers is now officially open. Interested speakers can send their proposals with the title of their talk, speaker bio, and a short description of the talk until January 7, 2010 to
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• 4th Annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit. April 14-16, 2010, Hotel Kabuki, San Francisco, CA. Japantown in San Francisco will be the home again next year for the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, an invitation-only summit that will gather core kernel developers, distribution maintainers, ISVs, end users, system vendors and other community organizations to meet face-to-face to tackle and solve the most pressing issues facing Linux today. Want to be a part of it? Request an invite now. But registration is limited so please submit your invitation request to the Collab Summit today.
• Red Hat Summit/JBoss World, June 22-25, 2010, Seaport World Trade Center, Boston, MA. It seems like just yesterday that I was in Chicago for the 2009 edition of these events, but this week Red Hat has announced the call for papers for these massive events. This year’s event promises more technical content, and a new joint track on cloud computing.
• LinuxCon, August 10-12, 2010, Renaissance Boston Waterfront, Boston, MA. This is the event for which I am the most excited: the Linux Foundation’s annual technical conference that covers all matters Linux. LinuxCon will bring together the best and brightest that the Linux community has to offer, including core developers, administrators, end users, community managers and industry experts–all together to learn and share new ideas about Linux.

There will be more events coming in 2010, of course, but these are the ones I am really looking forward to at the moment. I am sure this list will expand as the year starts and more conferences are announced. For now, this is my travel wish list for 2010. Tell me what I missed, or better yet, add event information in the Events section so everyone can start planning which events they will attend.