During my keynote at LinuxCon, I showed a picture of five smart phones from five different manufacturers with their screens blacked out. Think you could tell them apart? Without a UI they are all virtually indistinguishable from each other. When their screens are enabled, it’s easy to tell the difference between Blackberry’s and iPhone's, Samsung’s Android devices and Nokia’s Windows based machine. My point? Software is where the heart of differentiation lies.

Linux Foundation events are studded with Linux and open source community leaders, as well as some eccentric personalities. What better place than one of these events to sit down and talk to the people who are making innovation happen in software development and cloud computing?

Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab is running its private production and development cloud on Ganeti, an open source virtualization management platform developed at Google. The system is easy to deploy and manage and is ideal for small to medium-sized businesses and academic institutions that want to set up a private cloud with minimal resources.