I’ll be at The Atlantic’s Big Science Summit tomorrow with space explorers, energy researchers and robotics engineers. How did Zemlin get in, you ask? There’s more reason here than you think.

A lot has changed in the three years since the last major Windows announcement. Netbooks were on the rise. The iPad wouldn’t be introduced for another six months and Nokia still had the lead for most smartphone sales in the world. Only 172 million smartphones were sold in 2009 vs. an estimated 146 million units in just one quarter of this year. Without wide adoption of tablets or smartphones, Microsoft still dominated the world of personal computing. Linux, while popular in the server room, was virtually non-existent in consumer products, except for its brief rise in netbooks before Microsoft reportedly pressured its OEMs to stop production and shift back to Windows.  

LinuxCon Europe is approaching fast. We'll be gathering in Barcelona, Spain November 5-7, 2012 to help developers, SysAdmins and business executives connect and collaborate while having a great time. One of this year's keynote spakers is Dave Engberg, CTO at Evernote. He'll be sharing a story with LinuxCon attendees about how his company designed a a system for millions of users with Linux and open source best practices that why it didn't fit the cloud model. Here he shares with us more details about what we can expect from his keynote, as well as his thoughts on cloud computing and collaborative development.

This week's top open source cloud headlines raised a few interesting questions. Does OpenStack need a Linus Torvalds? And can Eucalyptus be the next billion-dollar open source company? Announcements from Rackspace and OpenNebula are also featured, along with an inside look at Cisco's OpenStack Edition.