Sam Varghese
Thursday, 24 December 2009 05:12
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 3
For the second time in its 11-year history, Australia's national Linux conference (LCA) has a distro summit on its agenda. The last distro summit was held in 2008, when former Linux Australia president Jonathan Oxer was the organiser.
This time, Debian developers Martin F. Krafft and Fabio Tranchitella are behind the summit which is one of the
mini-conferences to be held on the first two days of the week-long
LCA in Wellington from January 18 to 23.
The summit has come about as a result of Krafft's efforts to resurrect the Debian miniconf which was last held at the 2008 LCA in Melbourne.
"I decided in
Hobart to resurrect the Debian miniconf, and since Jonathan couldn't commit to it at the time, he passed everything on to me," Krafft told iTWire.
"
Fabio Tranchitella , who responded to my public request for helpers, and I then submitted the Debian miniconf to LCA, but we were apparently not the only distro people (OpenSolaris was the main other contender IIRC).
"Hence, Francois Marier, the miniconf organiser, asked the two of us to coordinate between the distros, and we thus resurrected
distrosummit.org and went to work to organise a miniconf with a cross-distro focus."
Krafft says that apart from his full support, Oxer didn't try to influence the organisation. "We also never really asked him for feedback."
Oxer said: "I had a small amount of feedback saying that it was helpful, but there were fewer participants (in
2008) than I hoped. My suspicion is that people were worried it would turn into a 'my distro is better than yours' flame-fest and stayed away, but the reality was a much more open and collaborative discussion and it was quite a positive feeling.
"Hopefully the groundwork laid by the first Distro Summit combined with Martin's enthusiasm and initiative will lead to a more well-attended event in 2010."
In the last year, there has been
considerable interest in cross-distro collaboration shown by the Ubuntu project.
