Follow up on Ottawa Linux Symposium

I just wanted to write a quick follow up on the Ottawa Linux Symposium (OLS) that I attended last week. It was the first one that I attended, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. Ottawa is a wonderful city, and sadly this is the last one that is going to be there for the next few years. It moves to Montreal next year, due to them tearing down and redesigning the Congress Centre (Canadian spelling).

From my understanding, the attendance was down slightly from last year. But, it had a nice small conference feeling, so you were able to interact with quite a few individuals. And, there were some very interesting tutorials by leading Linux kernel developers throughout the week. All in all, a lot of good information to digest.

My Birds Of a Feather (BOF) session was on Wednesday evening. Going into it, I was unsure of the audience I would attract. Being that my session was nearly the only one without a technical bent to it, I was traveling in the world of the unknown. But, I had to take that chance, since they finally allowed me to speak. Thanks goes to Andrew and the rest of the crew for giving me the opportunity.

Luckily, the audience I received surpassed my expectations. I thank all of those who took the time out of their schedule to listen to the information I was presenting. The 45 minute presentation was followed by a Q&A session that lasted another 45 minutes. I was shocked! There were wonderful questions and dialogue between the various Linux kernel developers in attendance. I was thrilled to see the thought that a lot of the developers have put into thinking about their careers. These people truly see the benefit that open source software participation has on their growth, both professionally and personally.

Once again, I thoroughly enjoyed myself at OLS. I am sure that it will continue to be a successful conference for years to come, and perhaps I will get a chance to speak again in the future.

Growth in Open Source Related Jobs

Bill Snyder last week wrote a good blog entry on the growth in the open source labor market. The information was gathered through an O'Reilly research report. It provides a good overview of the marketplace.

The interesting part is the final section on how open source is under the radar screen. Just to show you how much, this blog entry summarizes a survey done by Goldman Sachs and mentions open source software on the low end of the priority scale, according to CIO's. Just makes you wonder how much they know about their internal operations. In any regard, we will see which survey is more accurate, but I am betting on the O'Reilly one.

OLS is next week!!!!

I will be headed up to the Ottawa Linux Symposium next week. My BOF is scheduled to take place on Wednesday, July 23 at 5:45PM. I look forward to hopefully seeing a good crowd there. In addition, if anyone would like to meet up during the conference, please feel free to send me an email at brent@hotlinuxjobs.com. Look forward to visiting our friends to the north next week!!