LocalFOSS

From the 15th to the 20th of January, the University of New South Wales played host to over seven hundred Free and Open Source Software hackers and users for the 2007 linux.conf.au conference.

The conference, held every year since 2001, aims to bring together the community in a week long hackfest. This year was no different. Featuring keynote addresses from the likes of Chris Blizzard of the OLPC team, Andrew Tannenbaum - famous both for writing one of the most used Operating System text books and for claiming he would have failed Linus Torvalds if he had been Tannenbaums student and a host of others.

Some people were so keen to attend the conference they resorted to "e-begging" for the money to attend. One such group, best know for their site pleasesendustolinuxconfau.info raised almost $10,000.00 US to cover the costs to attend from the United States, with a large part donated from their University.

As well as the keynote speakers, the conference boasted a number of high profile attendees, from Anthony Towns - Debian Project Leader to Bdale Garbee - HP's Chief Technologist for Linux and Open Source to Linus Torvalds himself. Attendees, speakers and FOSS "Names" mingled together with no apparant barrier. One attendee said "When you see Linus Torvalds lining up like everyone else for a beer, you've got to have some respect for him."  

This year has featured several new innovations, including the linux.conf.au Open Day. The brain child of Linux Australia Vice President and linux.conf.au 2007 team member Pia Waugh, the Open Day aimed to enable the public to have a look at what the FOSS community was doing. This years Open Day featured everything from a build it yourself 3-d Printer, to an Open Source Segway. Your's truly even had a stall, streaming out a two hour episode of Open Source On The Air.

This year also featured a renewed effort to ensure that talks were video taped and made available online. As it currently stands over 25 talks are now available for downloading or streaming. The talks are available in Ogg/Theora format and be found on the programme page of the conference.

With the end of the conference many attendees have said they will definitely be returning in 2008, which is going to be held in Melbourne.