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Our Blogs Open Sauce linux.conf.au: Bid to bring distros together | linux.conf.au: Bid to bring distros together |
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| by Sam Varghese | |
| Friday, 09 November 2007 | |
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Hence, one has to be a brave man (or woman) to try and bring developers of different distributions together in order that common ground can be explored and ways of avoiding duplication examined. Melbourne-based web developer Jonathan Oxer has chosen to take on this task and will be hosting a distributions mini-conference during the Linux conference which is to be held in Melbourne from January 28 to February 2 next year. Oxer, who is also a Debian developer, had a trial run of sorts at the 2007 conference when he devoted about an hour of the Debian mini-conference he was holding to discuss other distributions. Things didn't go as swimmingly as expected as all the Debian people got up and left once the discussion about their own distribution was over. Apart from his involvement in the Debian project, Oxer has also crafted some Ubuntu hacks and written a book about it along with two others, Kyle Rankin and Bill Childers. He has experienced the conflicts between these two communities and also knows the extent of common cause which the two projects have. "There is lots of duplication of effort and unnecessary conflict," he says. "We must try to emphasise common ground and ways to break down the walls between distributions." Oxer expects people associated with at least five distributions - Debian, Red Hat, SUSE, Ubuntu and Gentoo - to attend the mini conference. He has already received two proposals for papers and hopes to publish a programme soon. He concedes that such a mini-conference may well turn out to be a flop. But he is hopeful that it will prove to be a worthwhile exercise. Oxer will be running the Debian mini-conference as well but as president of Linux Australia he, and the organisation's committee, have a much wider role in the Linux conference. |
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