linux.conf.au 2015 News

On Thursday, as part of our taking a different approach to keynote sessions for linux.conf.au 2015, we’re offering representatives from 3 leaders in open source to give us their “15 minutes of foo” to start our day. We expect this will be interesting, enlightening and entertaining.

Cooper Lees - Facebook

Representing Facebook we’ve got Cooper Lees providing an insight into the numerous open source projects they leverage every day, how they are working upstream, and innovations like the Open Compute Projects and FBOSS (their linux switch/router project).

Cooper is a Production Engineer in the Network PE team at Facebook in Menlo Park, CA, originally hailing from Wollongong, NSW, Australia. Network PE help the ‘true’ Network Engineers automate the network, not re-invent the wheel and take on existing Facebook technologies that solve their problem. Outside of being a nerd, Cooper enjoys playing Cricket, AFL (yes, in the Bay area) and Snowboarding in Tahoe as much as possible.

Carol Smith - Google

Google Summer of code is now 10 years old, and Carol Smith from Google will be provide an update on the project and how this is benefiting the open source community in our part of the world.

Carol Smith is an Open Source Programs Manager at Google. She has managed the Google Summer of Code program for 5 years. She has a degree in Journalism from California State University, Northridge.

Mark McLoughlin - Red Hat

Then from Red Hat we’ve Mark McLoughlin with some insight on some of the innovation we should see in 2015. Mark will give a whirlwind tour of recent technology shifts - covering everything from virtualization, containers, IaaS, PaaS, SDN, scale-out storage, Big Data, DevOps and more - and how they are all coming together to form the basis of today's agile data center.

Mark McLoughlin is a consulting engineer at Red Hat and has spent over a decade contributing to and leading open source projects like GNOME, Fedora, KVM, qemu, libvirt, oVirt and, of course, OpenStack. Mark is a member of OpenStack’s technical committee and the OpenStack Foundation board of directors. He contributes mostly to Oslo, Nova and TripleO but will happily dive in to any project.

Our Wednesday Keynote speaker is Bob Young, founder and chairman of Lulu.com, co-founder of Red Hat and the Center for Public Domain.

Bob Young is the founder and chairman of Lulu.com, a premiere international marketplace for new digital content on the Internet, with more than 300,000 recently published titles and more than 15,000 new creators from 80 different countries joining each week.

Lulu.com, founded in 2002, is Young's most recent endeavour. The success of this company has earned Young notable recognition; he was named one of the "Top 50 Agenda-Setters in the Technology Industry in 2006" and was ranked as the fourth "Top Entrepreneur for 2006," both by Silicon.com.

In 1993, Young co-founded Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the open-source software company that gives hardware and software vendors a standard platform on which to certify their technology. Red Hat is a Fortune 500 company and chief rival to Microsoft. His success at Red Hat won him industry accolades, including nomination as one of Business Week's "Top Entrepreneurs" in 1999

Before founding Red Hat, Young spent 20 years at the helm of two computer-leasing companies that he founded. His experiences as a high tech entrepreneur combined with his innate marketing savvy led to Red Hat's success. His book, "Under the Radar", chronicles how Red Hat's open source strategy successfully won wide industry acceptance in a market previously dominated by proprietary binary-only systems. Young has also imparted the lessons learned from his entrepreneurial experiences through his contributions to the books to "You've GOT to Read This Book!" and "Chicken Soup for the Entrepreneur's Soul."

In 2000, Young co-founded the Center for Public Domain, a non-profit foundation created to bolster healthy conversation of intellectual property, patent and copyright law, and the management of the public domain for the common good. Grant recipients included the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Creative Commons, the Free Software Foundation, and the Future of Music Coalition.

In addition to enjoying fly fishing, Young collects calculators and antique typewriters, a nod to his beginnings as a typewriter salesman and can usually be found sporting a pair of red socks. However, instead of red on his head, Young now tips his orange hat.

The LCA 2015 Auckland Team

Today we have our first Keynote speaker - Professor Eben Moglen, Executive Director of the Software Freedom Law Center and professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University Law School.

Professor Moglen's presentation is scheduled for 09:00 am Tuesday, 13 January 2015 so don't be late.

Professor Moglen has represented many of the world's leading free software developers. He earned his PhD in History and his law degree at Yale University during what he sometimes calls his “long, dark period” in New Haven.

After law school he clerked for Judge Edward Weinfeld of the United States District Court in New York City and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. He has taught at Columbia Law School since 1987 and has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, Tel Aviv University and the University of Virginia.

In 2003 he was given the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award for efforts on behalf of freedom in the electronic society.

The LCA 2015 Auckland Team

The LCA 2015 team is honoured to announce our first Keynote speaker - Professor Eben Moglen, Executive Director of the Software Freedom Law Center and professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University Law School.

Professor Moglen's presentation is scheduled for 09:00 am Tuesday, 13 January 2015

Professor Moglen has represented many of the world's leading free software developers. He earned his PhD in History and his law degree at Yale University during what he sometimes calls his “long, dark period” in New Haven.

After law school he clerked for Judge Edward Weinfeld of the United States District Court in New York City and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. He has taught at Columbia Law School since 1987 and has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, Tel Aviv University and the University of Virginia.

In 2003 he was given the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award for efforts on behalf of freedom in the electronic society.

We are especially grateful to Michael Davies for his efforts in bringing Professor Moglen to LCA 2015 in Auckland for us - thank you Michael!

The LCA 2015 Auckland Team