Category: Syndicated

It’s been a busy time here at UbuCon central. First the venue – Leslie kindly updated the wiki to include the latest:

Google’s NYC office is located at 76 9th Avenue in Chelsea, Manhattan, between 8th and 9th Avenue and 15th and 16th Street. Please enter the building on the northwest side (16th Street & 9th Avenue). A Google representative will be on hand to greet you, provide you with a building badge, and direct you to the 8th floor. To get to Google New York, take the A/C/E or L subway to 14th Street, and exit onto 8th Avenue. Alternatively, the 1/2/3 subway lines and M11, M14, and M20 buses service the surrounding area. If you are driving, the closest parking lot is located in the building, accessible from 15th or 16th Street.

Note that we will have to supply video cameras if we want to record any sessions. Please let us know if you would like to volunteer for this – we will set you up with the Google AV staff to discuss logistics.

As seen on TINOSC: Regardless of what transpires, we don’t get any more silly stories about whether Open Source will survive. Well, sometimes we do, but I don’t think anyone actually takes them seriously. The market has matured to the point where many finally understand that any one company’s failing is not representative of the entire Open Source community



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The building where Google NYC is located requires all visitors to be pre-registered with security, so make sure to register on the RSVP page. Registration is free of charge and all are welcome to attend, but we’ll need you to register by 5 PM Eastern time on Wednesday, February 14, 2007 to get you on the guest list. If you’ve already registered, take another look at the page, as a great deal of additional detail has been added.

We’ve also added a section for proposed session topics to the conference schedule page, including hours for the Ubucon NY. If you’d so like to give a talk at the Ubucon NY, add your thoughts to this page. In true unconference style, we’ll finalize the agenda following the opening remarks.

For folks hoping to share a ride from the airport, find housing or organize another activity around the Ubucon, we’ve added a meetups page. Subscribe to this page for updates and use this page to organize anything you want before or after the conference; we’ll use the mailing list for planning any activities during the day.

See you tomorrow at 6 PM Eastern for the first Ubucon NY IRC planning meeting – #ubucon on irc.freenode.net. Cheers, Leslie Hawthorn, wearing both my Ubuntu and Google hat

The wiki is coming along. There is now the beginnings of an RSVP list. If you’d like to attend, please add your name to the RSVP.

I’m happy to say that things are moving forward on the ubucon planned for February 16 at Google’s offices in Manhattan. It will be a mixture of un-conference, installfest and user group meeting for Ubuntu users, developers and the simply curious. Visit the wiki Join the mailing list And stop by #ubucon on irc.freenode.net. We will have the first IRC get-together for anyone interested on Friday, January 26 at 6pm ET.

Matt Asay had a mild critique of Mark Shuttleworth to which I responded in the comments. Read Matt’s critique first, and then I’ll repost below what I wrote there:

I think his [Mark’s] main point is that it’s difficult to get a polished, end-user friendly product out of the other guys. I agree that the “going from shrink-wrap to shrink-wrap” is a bogus comment, but I don’t think that was the real point. The real point is that he’s slamming other community editions and stating that Ubuntu is a better supported and more polished community distro.

I happen to agree – not because Ubuntu is perfect, which it certainly is not, but because I’m a former Fedora user who was ultimately frustrated by the lack of devotion to something that actually worked for end-users.

I agree that Red Hat has every right to charge for services and must do that in order to survive. I think Mark is just trying to position Ubuntu favorably against the other guys. Whether he’s successful at that is another question. IMHO, Linux supporters and distros will have to work very very hard to offer a compelling reason for Windows users and sysadmins to switch, and I don’t feel that the current tactics of either Red Hat or Novell do that. In my mind, they have to have a compelling community edition in order to seed the earth in preparation for enterprise upselling.

I have long been a proponent of Ubuntu’s community-based approach, mostly because I feel that the larger distributions get it wrong and aren’t really helping win more market share for Linux.

Viva la Ubuntu!

More details coming very, very soon. Rest assured, this will happen, and things are coming together rather quickly.

You know you want to do it… Here’s a page where you can start.”Edgy Edge” will be the next version of Ubuntu, and it’s scheduled to ship this month. Kudos to the Ubuntu folks for sticking with the original release schedule – as you may recall, 6.06 was orginally supposed to be 6.04, but then it was delayed for 2 months. Sticking to Ubuntu’s mandated 6-month release cycle means that Edge will be 6.10, although I don’t think anyone would give them too much grief if they had decided to make this one 6.12 instead. Confused? Meh, just download it and don’t worry about it :@)Relax… don’t worry… have a homebrew install Ubuntu 😀 😀 😀

Now I know why someone asked if I knew this was a Blog of Note. Hey, it was only on the right-hand side of blogger.com under the big heading “Blogs of Note”. Nope, don’t know how I could have known that 🙁 Thanks to whoever put it there, and please forgive my ignorance.