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. Embedded Linux? Mark Charlebois from the Qualcomm Innovation Center will give us his insight on how the embedded and mobile industries are changing and how Linux is fueling that change. Cloud Computing? We are lucky to have Marten Mickos, Chief Executive Officer at Eucalyptus Systems and former CEO of MySQL. Marten is at the forefront of the open cloud movement. Mobile Linux? Phil McKinney,...

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. Today Linux is literally everywhere: in your phone, at your ATM, in your TV, on your desktop, at the movies,...

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). As Wired Magazine said, “When it comes to American technology innovation over the last hundred years, IBM is unparalleled.” Of course Watson runs Linux, and we’re thrilled to feature the Principal Investigator of the Watson...

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. Pundits have criticized this strategy as being out-dated in today’s fast moving tablet market. What exactly are they criticizing? 1. The time it will take for Microsoft to ready this system. Because Microsoft is waiting for its next release cycle, this Windows Tablet OS isn’t expected until 2012. That’s a lifetime in a  market like this. 2. Microsoft is taking a desktop client and force fitting it into a tablet form factor. That likely means tablets running Windows will need more processor power and have shorter battery...