Southeast Linux Fest review

Posted by:

admin 14 years, 5 months ago

The Southeast Linux Fest was a great show.  The organizers did a fantastic job. They were quite adept at hacking some fixes together to cover shortfalls such as writing up schedule signs for each room. 

The morning keynote from Jono Bacon of Ubuntu was quite interesting. They are promoting development tools that will allow you to quickly "get to the fun", that is, to focus on writing code and not on packaging, version control, etc.  They keystone of this effort is Quickly, a rapid development tool and Personal Package Archives, which are basically a programmers own repository.  I love this strategy. It is the open-source response to the App Store business model.  What they will need to figure out is the trust model (as does Android/Google).  As the recent IRC malware episode demonstrates, how do you promote/create a dynamic ecosystem while maintaining security?  Apple has done this (to date).  I still think that Oracle needs to create an app store for Java.

I enjoyed the talks from John "Maddog" Hall, Brian Smith of DNS.com, and Michael DaHaan from Puppet Labs and many others.  One problem is that I spoke at the same time as two other talks I wanted to see: Vicent Batts on the Hudson build system and the ever-wonderful Rikki Kite on getting published. 

I spent some time with the vendors and sponsors as always. Click2try is an interesting cloud play. They create virtual systems for demos and provide some sales support tools for their customers.  I had a great talk with Paul Bibaud of Pogo Linux.  They have done appliance work for other security vendors such as Barracuda.  We talked about the options for a WiKID appliance. They are killing it in the storage space, btw, with a ZFS-based solution that is screaming fast and much less expensive than EMC et al.  I enjoyed spending time with the OpenNMS team as always.  They are very active at the fests and a great sponsor.  And, to top it off,  DualCore  was the entertainment for the Saturday night party. 

My talk was well-received, I think.  I had standing-room only (in a smaller room ;), which is nice.  I highly encourage information security professionals to present at Linux Fests around the country.  While it's not the same as the big cons in Vegas and San Francisco, it's a great community that is interested in learning more about security. 

I'm sure I left out a bunch people and companies.  Apologies for that.  Luckily, I can try again next year.

• Tags:
• Open Source,
• WiKID

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