That alone should provide an indication of the extent to which Australians have been, and are, involved in the free and open source software community. From Monday, Sydney's University of New South Wales will play host to the eighth Australian Linux Conference better known as linux.conf.au.

Melbourne was the pioneer, hosting what was then called the Conference of Australian Linux Users in July 1999. The three-day affair at the Monash University attracted a big crowd, with Linux International's Jon "Maddog" Hall also putting in an appearance. Hall is one of the best known and most vociferous FOSS advocates.

From the start, the emphasis has been on the technical side of things and even the Melbourne conference drew luminaries like Andrew Tridgell of Samba and rsync fame. There was one speaker from the BSD world, with Darren Reed, who has developed ipfilter, giving a talk.

Over the past seven years - barring 2000 when it wasn't held - the conference has expanded considerably and now runs over a week. The conference has moved from city to city, even going across the Tasman last year to Dunedin. In 2003, the creator of Linux, Linus Benedict Torvalds, put in a surprise appearance atthe Perth event. Sydney last played host in 2001 and apart from Hobart, every major Australian city has now had a turn to host the event. Next year it is expected that Melbourne will be the host

The biggest noise at the conference this year will undoubtedly be Theodore Ts'o, a systems programmer at IBM and probably the first Linux kernel hacker from North America, having been at the task since 1991. Ted holds a number of administrative posts on bodies connected with FOSS; he is also a member of the standards-setting Internet Engineering Task Force.

A number of mini conferences will be held on the first two days and it is noticeable that there is none which covers KDE, the best known desktop environment in the Linux (and indeed Unix) world. Debian, Gnome, MySQL and PostgreSQL feature on this roster.