Reaching the summit

From the “Oh-wait-before-I-forget” desk: I mentioned in yesterday’s blog item that we were free of any events leading up to SCALE 11X in Los Angeles in February. Well, let’s back up a little bit, because there’s one more FOSS event that bears mention and, if you’re up to it, your presence.

The OLPC San Francisco Community Summit takes place — where else? — in San Francisco on Oct. 19-21 at the San Francisco State University downtown campus at 835 Market Street.

The summit brings together educators, technologists, anthropologists, enthusiasts, champions and volunteers to share stories, exchange ideas, solve problems, foster community and build collaboration around the One Laptop Per Child project and its mission worldwide.

There are few endeavors in the FOSS realm — or any realm for that matter — which are more noble than the One Laptop Per Child project, and it should be on everyone’s radar.

The event is in its fourth year and is becoming an important part of the XO and OLPC year. Kudos to Sameer Verma of SFSU and the others who make this happen, and I’ll try to make it up for the Sunday sessions.

Paul Venezia and Etienne Perot nail it

Well, I didn’t write this, but it bears repeating. In an InfoWorld blog item, Paul Venezia pretty much explains why the Amazon thing is not Ubuntu’s biggest problem. Rather than paraphrase, I’ll let you read it on your own:

http://www.infoworld.com/d/data-center/ubuntu-has-bigger-problem-its-amazon-blunder-203467

Best quote: “But the biggest problem I have with the Amazon debacle is another comment by Shuttleworth: “Don’t trust us? Erm, we have root. You do trust us with your data already.” That level of hubris from the founder of Ubuntu, in the face of what is clearly a bad idea badly implemented, should leave everyone with a bad taste in their mouth. If this idea can make it to the next Ubuntu release, then what other bad ideas are floating around? What’s next? Why should we maintain that trust?”

Indeed.

Further, and quoted in the blog above, Etienne Perot outlines what a mess this is — and how to get out of it — in a post from a few weeks ago here:

https://perot.me/ubuntu-privacy-blunder-over-amazon-ads-continues

One of the solutions: See “Step 3: Make it opt-in, rather than opt-out”.

Canonical, white courtesy phone . . .

Never too early for SCALE

Now that Ohio Linux Fest is in the books and now that the only thing really left on the Linux horizon is LISA in San Diego just after Thanksgiving — but then, LISA is not for us mere mortals, but for the hallowed and revered system administrators. So we get to set our sights on Linux/FOSS events for next year.

Starting in February, we get to turn it up to 11.

The Southern California Linux Expo SCALE 11X takes place in February again — thank goodness — and is scheduled for Feb. 22-24, 2013, at the Hilton Los Angeles Airport hotel. As you might recall, SCALE 10X was moved to January, the weekend after linux.conf.au in Australia. While this caused a moderate amount of hue and cry, it proved that two major Linux events could be held on consecutive weekends on two separate continents.

Fortunately, we don’t have to deal with that exercise again this time, with SCALE 11X returning to its usual Presidents Day weekend schedule in February.

Here’s the lowdown: The call for papers opened about a month ago, and the deadline for submissions is Dec. 10. You’ll be notified by Christmas if your talk has been accepted. A complete run-down of what to do and how to do it can be found here.

Registration? If you’re ready to register, go ahead. You can go here and sign up now.

Matthew Garrett is giving one of the two keynotes at SCALE 11X, and his talk is entitled “The Secure Boot Journey.” He plans to detail his work over the past year – technical, political and diplomatic – in getting Linux to run on Unified Extensible Firmware Interface — more commonly known as UEFI — Secure Boot systems. He will outline the scenario where Linux users could not only be assured that they can run Linux out of the box in UEFI-based systems, but also how Secure Boot can be used to enhance security.

The second keynote has yet to be decided.

The usual tracks will be present as well as the celebrated UpSCALE talks and the legendary Games Event on Saturday night. More information on the keynote and other SCALE 11X developments will be released, of course, as they are confirmed.

Watch this space, or visit the SCALE 11X page at http://www.socallinuxexpo.org

This blog, and all other blogs by Larry the Free Software Guy and Larry Cafiero, are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND license. In short, this license allows others to download this work and share it with others as long as they credit me as the author, but others can’t change it in any way or use it commercially.

(Larry Cafiero is one of the founders of the Lindependence Project and develops business software at Redwood Digital Research, a consultancy that provides FOSS solutions in the small business and home office environment.)