A tale of two conferences

Like many communities, the Linux community depends heavily on conferences as a way to help our developers and users know each other and work well together. We make highly effective use of electronic communications, but there is truly no substitute for occasionally getting together, sharing a beer or three, and engaging in some high-bandwidth discussion. So it stands to reason we want our events to be as productive and useful as possible, especially given the expense of participating in them.

Your editor recently had the fortune of attending, over the course of one week, two conferences which are arguably the oldest and the newest in our community. They were both interesting events, but they were very different in their organization and attendance. Both show both strengths and weaknesses in our organization of face-to-face events.

Arguably, the first Linux-related event ever was Linux-Kongress 1994. That gathering brought together developers working on the Linux kernel for the first time; it played host to a large portion of the (quite small) development community. For a period of time thereafter, Linux-Kongress was the development event for people working at or near the kernel level. It didn't take too long for other conferences (notably Linux Expo in the US) to grab some of the spotlight, but, unlike Linux Expo, Linux-Kongress is still an active conference.

The 2008 event, in Hamburg, Germany, was well organized and a lot of fun; it was a pleasant gathering of a part of the community which your editor visits far too rarely. It was a technical conference for technical people, with a number of well-known developers present. But it must be said: Linux-Kongress is a small and relatively obscure event in 2008. There were maybe 200 attendees; much of the northern European development community was absent. Even some developers based in Hamburg declined to attend. The quality of the talks was not uniformly good, though some were excellent. And, in stark contrast to the recent Linux Plumbers Conference, it's hard to point at much work that got done. For something that was once the Linux development gathering, Linux-Kongress has clearly come down in the world.

It is interesting to observe that Europe, while being the home to large numbers of free software developers, lacks a definitive development conference. That is not to say that no interesting events happen there; GUADEC and Akademy are probably the biggest desktop conferences, and the upcoming combined event is something to look forward to. But developers looking for a pan-European, Linux-oriented conference will not find one. LinuxConf.eu, a combination of the UKUUG and Linux-Kongress events held in Cambridge last year, offered the potential to become such an event, but the LinuxConf.eu idea appears to have stalled for now.

From Hamburg, your editor flew straight to New York City, where the Linux Foundation's End-User Summit was held. This event, happening for the first time, differs greatly from Linux-Kongress in many ways. To begin with, it was an invitation-only event, and one which explicitly excluded the press (which is why there have been no LWN articles from there). It was also intended to host a mixture of developers and users, and to allow them to talk to each other. These characteristics led to a different sort of conference experience.

[PULL QUOTE: We do not run an invitation-only community; excluding people from our conferences seems to run counter to the inclusive atmosphere we normally try to encourage. END QUOTE] The invitation-only nature of some Linux Foundation events naturally leads to complaints. We do not run an invitation-only community; excluding people from our conferences seems to run counter to the inclusive atmosphere we normally try to encourage. The Linux Foundation's reasoning here is easy to understand, though: many of the targeted end users (who represent mainly the financial industry in New York) have a hard time talking about what they are doing in any setting. In an open conference with press in attendance, those people will simply keep their mouths closed - if they show up at all.

The user community represented by the financial industry is important; they are a significant part of the business which keeps the enterprise distributions going. Even now, they are highly sought after as customers. It is important to know what they are thinking and what their biggest difficulties with Linux are. In the absence of an event like the End User Summit, this information will only be communicated directly to the enterprise distributors under a non-disclosure agreement. An invitation-only summit is fundamentally exclusive at one level, but it does help the development community (as opposed to one or two companies) get a sense for what this user community is thinking.

So what are they thinking? They feel some stress between the stability of enterprise distributions and the desire to have the features developed by the community in recent years. They want good tracing mechanisms, but do not necessarily need the dynamic tracing provided by tools like DTrace or SystemTap. They like Linux because its broad hardware support frees them from reliance on any specific hardware vendor. They are very interested in work on next-generation filesystems. Some of them, at least, very much want to better understand how our development process works and, possibly, participate in it. See the Linux Foundation's press release for a summary of what was discussed there.

It was a productive gathering, especially once the CEOs got off the stage and the attendees were able to talk to each other. But it points out another thing that we, as a community, lack: there are few forums where developers and users can get together and learn from each other. Developers tend to prefer the company of other developers; convincing them to go to more user-oriented events can be a challenge. So the closest thing we have to a combined user/developer event is the single-vendor conferences held by companies like Red Hat and Novell. Those, needless to say, are not the most community-oriented gatherings. They are not the best way to learn what our users are thinking.

The proposed LinuxCon event, to be co-located with the 2009 Linux Plumbers Conference, may help to fill in this gap somewhat.

Our community is blessed with a wealth of interesting gatherings worldwide. But that doesn't mean that we can't do better. Whether the subject is a true pan-European Linux gathering, user-oriented conferences, or something else altogether, there are always opportunities to find ways to help our community be more cohesive and productive. The trick is to expand communications to a broader community - as seen in our newest conference - while growing the open collaborative spirit exemplified by our oldest one.

---

(Log in to post comments)