hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr0273.txt

Episode: 273
Title: HPR0273: The socal Linux Expo
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0273/hpr0273.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 15:21:10

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Hello and welcome to Tax Public Radio.
I am Woodjabute and with us is
Tell us about your thoughts guys.
Go ahead Elon.
Oh sure.
My name is Elon.
We're going to join with the Southern California Linux Expo and I'm currently the
conference chair and as well as the sponsorship chair for the event.
Yeah.
Or beach.
Yeah.
Or beach.
I'm the publicity chair for scale.
Excellent.
And you see, let me bring up my list of questions here.
I came all prepared with a whole list.
Yeah.
So what do you, why don't you guys give us an overview of some of the current papers that have been presented?
They're human that are scheduled to be presented?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Sure.
You know, it's more interesting.
We've got quite a few presentations this year.
One of our two key notes this year are going to be Joe Zunker, Brockmeyer from open
Susa and Novell, as well as Bradley Coon from the software Freedom Law Center.
And Joe is going to be discussing a bit about how to develop a community marketing plan for an open source project.
What are some of the top 10 things that you need to do to improve the way you reach new users and new developers things to that extent?
As an open source developer, a community member around the open source project.
And then Bradley is going to be discussing a little bit more about software as a service and how that interacts with free
and open source software and licensing around that.
Awesome.
Those should be two very, the kind of key notes that start out with.
Awesome.
What else besides talks do you have going on, the eventers that come in?
Yeah.
So we have an expo floor that's about, you have an expo floor at scale.
It has a number of different exhibitors.
We generally have it somewhere between 70 and 80 years exhibitors each year.
And what we try to do is we try to make sure that about half of those are open source and nonprofit groups.
Everything from Fedora and Ubuntu to groups like NotMist has been around in the past.
OpenSusile will be there this year.
Things like that.
And then we also have a number of sponsors that come out as well.
And that's about the other 50% expo floor.
So companies like IBM, Google, HP, you know, who sponsor the event.
Help fund this financially, but also help to keep that, also help demo their products on the expo floor, things like that.
So between the talks and expo floor, there's a pretty full weekend.
We also have a number of other, you know, sub events that take place around scale that aren't just presentations that are exciting as well.
We can talk about those two if you'd like.
Sure.
What about you going to some of those?
So, or do you want to touch on this?
Yeah. One thing we've offered for the last two or three years are spots for birds of a feather meetings.
You know, ad hoc meetings.
We offer space for groups to get together at scale.
And some of the ones that have signed up so far for buffs are pro-moners.
There's an open source audio group, MySQL, PostgreSQL.
There's another one, networking for free software activists.
And a couple of others in there are slots are about half full.
We're offering those to any groups that would like to talk.
There's a couple of other events happening, Elon. You want to talk about those?
Sure. So on Friday, we generally reserve some rooms for very niche tracks.
So, for example, we have an event this year on Women in Open Source.
This will be the third year that we're doing that.
We're women that are involved in the open source community will come and speak about how they got involved.
So the project that they're involved in and just their general experience with open source to try to get more women involved with the project.
We also have an event called Open Source Software Education, which, you know, as I don't suggest, is about open source software in the K-12 environment.
And so we've invited teachers and IT personnel from various local school districts and educational organizations to come in and learn about open source tools like Wikis and, you know, email solutions, web filtering, or anything that we really put in with the,
you know, Linux and Open Source at an educational institution.
So that's going to be very exciting because it'll be the second year we're doing that.
So we're hoping to see, you know, a strong turnout from the education community.
Some of the other events that are fairly new this year are, we've got some, we've got, you know, the Fedora folks have mentioned that they're going to be coming out and doing their ambassadors day this year.
And that's actually something new just in the last 24 to 40 hours, which is going to be a meeting for their, you know, for the various community members to come and talk about Fedora and plan some stuff for the New Year.
We'll have some announcements coming out about that.
And, you know, we'll also be inviting back our healthcare event, which is an open source event around healthcare software that's run by another group.
And they'll be out this year as well with two tracks about open source software in the healthcare industry.
So there's really, whether, you know, whether you're looking to get general information about Linux and Open Source at scale, or you're looking, or you're coming from a very niche perspective, and you're looking for it for a specific vertical or a specific type of job area that you're working in.
There's events for everybody.
Two other items that Elon didn't mention in addition to the Fedora ambassadors day on Friday.
Looks like Zenos Community Day is going to be held on Friday. They'll be coming together. They'll be announcing that soon. It will be a training day for them.
Looks like Subversion is also coming together, right Elon?
Yeah, so we've got the subversion folks are going to be coming out and doing a user community as well with presentations specific around the area of subversion and both for developers and users alike.
Awesome, so this is all like hot off the presses information.
Yeah, I don't believe we've actually announced it anywhere else yet, so you've got an exclusive.
I'm like publicity to do this.
So how did you get involved with this? Have you been involved with this from the beginning?
We have. Elon wrote up a really good article on it. The history and how it came about, so I can I'll let him recite that.
So the scale has been around for about this will be our seventh year running the event and we're all volunteers on the event.
It's completely organized by the community and by a core group of volunteers as well as some others that help join us at the event.
So we started this in 2002 and the first event we held was at USC, but prior to that a lot of us had been involved with a group called the Lug Fest out of the Simea, Kanaiho Valley, Lug, and that's really where the roots of scale came.
It's basically we were, you know, as users and community members are on open source, we really wanted a place where we could get together with other community members once a year, but also get all the presenters that go to the other conferences that were in Los Angeles.
There really wasn't much going on in Los Angeles in terms of open source events at the moment or in Southern California in general.
So we all kind of got together and started brainstorming about ways to do that and one of the things that came out of it was the Southern California Linux Expo.
And so while initially it started out as very much a user group event, if you look at our Expo floor from scale 1 back in 2002, I think it was more than half user groups if not in a very few actual open source projects.
We had mostly a lot of user groups, a couple vendors that were out to help sponsor the event and then just all presentations.
And since then we've grown quite a bit and we went from, I think our first year of was about somewhere between 400 to 600 attendees.
It was about 400 attendees.
Yeah, 400 attendees and so we're, you know, last year I think we were just under, just under 1300.
So it's been a fairly sizable growth over the years and as a result we're starting to see a lot more, you know, well-known speakers coming in from all over the world as well as, you know, exhibitors that are, you know, lining up to join us.
So we've got the actual open source projects coming up to some extent, not just the local user groups demoing the applications, which was great as well.
So they're starting to plan their get-togethers around scale, which is beneficial both ways. I think it's great to see.
Yeah, we started to sort of become a hub for the open source community to host their events.
So there's a number of, you know, while we'll host the main scale event, as we mentioned, there's the, you know, subversion days and xenostays and, you know, fedora days and different other groups.
And they'll come together and try to host their, you know, their events as sort of subconferences to scale.
So they get the benefit from the fact that, you know, the community is already together in one spot and we get to get benefit from the fact that we get really interesting folks coming out to talk about their projects.
Awesome. Yeah, sounds like, it sounds like a lot of fun. I wish I could be there. I'm in Ohio, so that would be quite a, quite a ride for me to go.
Are you familiar with Ohio in the past? Because there's a very similar event ours hosted out of Columbus.
Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I've heard of it, but I've never, I've never had the opportunity to make it down there.
They're really worth going to. They're just tons of fun.
Linux world is a huge event, but over the last number of years, it's got increasingly commercial.
They've kind of pushed the community out a bit.
Eli, you had mentioned that some of the vendors were a little upset about that because they get a lot of input from the community.
Do you want to comment on that?
Yeah, the vendors have started to have mentioned that a lot of our vendors have started to mention that for one thing they get a lot better bang for their buck at scale from both by being able to work with the community and get their input and build communities around their projects.
But also because the people that are coming out to scale are generally very excited about the technologies and about the products that they have to offer.
So they're coming in and they're having very serious discussions with them about how the technology works and where it can be improved, where it makes sense in their organizations thinks to that extent.
Whereas they found that a lot of times when they go to some of the larger events, and I don't want to single out Linux world, which is I think it's actually open source world these days.
When they go to those events, they get a lot of people coming around looking for swag, and while that's great and it's good to get your name out there, it's not necessarily where you're going to meet your customers.
Yeah, and it's really a full thing to do is to just go and get swag.
So it started to find that scale, like I said, is a really good bang for their buck in terms of getting together and maybe meeting with a smaller group of people, but they're a lot more focused on actually wanting to learn about your products and learn about your services.
And the comment you made in that article, you wrote up Elon was very pertinent that a lot of times they're looking for IT decision makers.
We do have a fair number of them coming by, but we also have a lot of decision influencers, IT workers and college students who will be future IT decision influencers.
So the smart vendor knows that they come here and show up very early on and get in the minds of their future customers.
That's on too commercial.
Well, regardless, I think it's true for our vendors.
And we do a fairly good job of balancing the community and the vendors, and I think everybody comes out happy in the end.
Yeah.
How is your experience with setting up Linux a little bit and running Linux for all the changes to your thoughts and ideas about Linux and open source software in general?
You mean organizing and being involved with scale?
Yeah.
Well, it's, I have to say, it's reduced my, some of the other community involvement that I've done in the past.
Unfortunately, we spend what is it over about eight months after the year working on scale these days.
So I don't get to tend to as many log meetings as I used to and would normally love to attend.
But for me, it's been a real educational experience.
I get to meet with a lot of folks that I normally wouldn't get to meet with and learn about their projects and the work that they're doing.
It's also been very helpful in my career as I go out and work on my day job as a systems administrator.
It's more than once gotten my foot in the door just by the fact that I say, hey, I'm one of the co-organizers of scale.
And they say, oh, I love scale. Why don't you come on by?
And it's definitely been interesting.
Or how about yourself?
Well, I don't know if it's, I hurt my, help my career or not. I'm an IT director at a hospital, by the way.
And slightly older than the rest of the guys.
Slightly.
He yelled at us to get off his lawn sometimes.
That's right.
Well, I'm probably younger than all of you. I'm 19.
You're probably, oh, geez.
You know, we've got a, our webmaster's probably about your age.
No, he's 22 now, Elon.
Oh, I guess I'm losing track of time.
Welcome to the club.
Anyway, what were we talking about?
He was asking us how scale has changed our perspective on the open source community and, you know, in general.
Well, I've always been a student of open source. I've been in it since 96.
It's been fun to watch it grow from the very beginnings and being on the publicity side.
Very early on, I was pimping open source to local PC clubs.
So I've been on the publicity and advocacy side from day one.
And being involved with scale, I've had a chance to rub shoulders with other like-minded people, some of the bloggers and writers in the open source community.
So that has helped my skills and the contacts have made it just that easier to help promulgate the idea of open source events.
And I've got some ideas going forward about the width and breadth of the open source shows that I want to talk to Elon about later on.
But that's for a different conversation.
It's very beneficial.
Cool.
And your last point brings me to my next question.
What do you both see as part of the future for Linux and open source software in general?
Well, I can start off by saying that my organization purchased 18,000 desktop licenses from Novel last fall.
And we've stated that we're going to move towards an open source platform as much as possible.
That answer your question?
Oh, yes.
Yeah.
We've never been a captive Microsoft shop.
Most hospitals and healthcare organizations came up through Novels.
It's an easy slide over to Novels, a sled and a sled and a lot of the guys up at corporate IT have fallen in love with packages like Plone and Drupal.
And things like that.
And they've gotten a lot more productive due to the fact that they can try a product and roll it out and roll out websites very, very quickly.
So it's been very beneficial for my company.
Awesome.
Awesome.
And, you know, from my end, that's just an observation.
It's just, you know, as scale grows, we definitely, you know, we can tell by the way scale has been growing that the open source community in general has also grown quite a bit from from the beginning.
You know, there's not as many folks showing up and saying, what is Linux to that extent?
But, you know, just everything from the, from the, from the desktop to things on the server and in the corporate end have just improved and leaps and bounds over the last seven years or so.
Since we've been running the event and we can only expect that it's going to keep growing at this pace, especially, especially the economy starts to, you know, starts to slow down a bit.
It's going to be really important for folks to be able to get the best, you know, the best bang for their buck as they're investing in their IT infrastructure and I think Linux and open source is really the place to do that.
And I can relate on the non commercial on the desktop side.
I mentioned I've been giving talks about Linux and open source to PC clubs for over 10 years now.
There's a club in the San Fernando Valley here in Southern California called Tugnet and I've been giving talks every 12 to 18 months for, I don't know, five or six years now.
And the first couple all that got was puzzled looks. And then over the years more people started nodding and then about two years ago they asked to do it and install fest at one of their clubs.
And by the way, these Windows PC clubs typically run two to 400 members. They're quite large.
Their membership is substantially older than people in the open source, but free software sounds really good to these folks.
A lot of them are retired. But in any case, they started paying more and more attention, more and more people started showing up.
The last one I gave there, I got mugged and all of my swag and CD giveaways was gone before they even got seeded.
Wow, they've really gotten the idea. And they in fact spun off a special interest group, Linux group that has about a dozen members.
And they're very happy to be on a stable operating system and they're having a ball. They're not learning real quickly, but they're just having fun.
And that's part of it is seeing people learn.
Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah, I myself can testify to the fact that the desktop Linux experiences vastly improved since I first got involved with Linux back in 2003.
I think it was. I started with Red Hat 7 on a original Pentium.
I remember in the old days.
Well, I won't tell you anymore except my first Linux install was 16 floppy.
Oh, and no ex. It was grim. And those were the bad old days. I'm very happy to see those days gone.
And I've got three technicians working for me here. And they're pretty smart, but they didn't have too much Linux experience until I started forcing it on them last year.
And they've been learning sled and fedora. And one of them who's learning quite quickly, but grumbles a lot about it because he likes to grumble.
But he did a Ubuntu installation the other night at home and he mentioned how brain-dense simple it was. So we've come a long way.
Indeed, indeed. I myself currently run the KDE version of Ubuntu.
I do that also at home. I'm quite happy with it. My wife's workstation runs fedora and has since it was, I don't know, Red Hat 9 about three or four years ago.
There's no Microsoft in our house.
And on our end, we're pretty much Ubuntu users at that home.
I even recently converted the wife off her Mac onto Ubuntu.
Wow. I'm impressed.
We got her a new toy and it was a netbook. It was either XP or Ubuntu. And I think we both felt that Ubuntu had been a better choice.
Yeah. I don't know if I forgot what I was going to say.
Never mind.
So what do you guys, that leads me to my next question. What do you guys do in your spare time?
What spare time.
Exactly.
Well, something I've revived recently. My mom was a long time genealogist in our family.
And after she passed away, I computerized all of her records. And back then, it was family tree maker under windows.
I was looking for a package to migrate it to because that was the only thing I was booting into windows for.
And I found a package called Gramps, which is a genealogy program.
Back then, it was pretty rough. And I watched it over the months and years. A couple years later, it was solid enough.
And I moved all my data over there. And it's just grown into a tremendous package.
So I spend, I don't know, three or four hours a month updating burst death marriages and stuff because it's got 4,600 people in it.
And that's a lot of data.
That's a nice application that's pretty much non-geek. And I use it as an example for things that ordinary computer using people at home might want to use.
Yeah, I myself, I've always been pretty far removed from the ordinary computer person.
I started programming when I was in freshman and high school in C++.
I came from the word go, huh?
Yeah, exactly, pretty much.
Well, I started out in the ham radio before there were computers. I've just kind of moved over into computers.
The other thing I'm doing these days, I'm running cat-five cables throughout the addicts and buying TVs and prepping to get a missed TV server running in the workshop with a couple of run-ins throughout the house.
That's my current project.
Well, by the way, I was asked to mention, well, today and tonight, that missed TV is now known as Linhez Linux Home Entertainment System.
Is that missed TV or the not missed guys?
Oh, the not missed.
Yeah, got it.
Yeah, okay.
We'll make sure to mention that and move forward.
Yeah.
Very cool.
You were asking about, you know, hobbies.
I think similar to ore of my time is pretty much all taken up by working by scale.
But one thing I wanted to just mention is I'm one of the co-organizers for GeekPack.
I'm one of the organization that's been starting the last year and a half or so.
It got really at our kickoff event at the last scale.
And we lobby around issues pertaining to information rights, copyright reform, things to that nature, open format.
And, you know, in the last year or so, I've been going around to all the Linux conferences and getting presentations on that.
So if anybody's out there is interested in those topics, GeekDashPack.org is our website.
Very cool.
So it sounds like you both are very busy men.
There's not much downtime, that's for sure.
Yeah.
It's more fun that way.
Indeed.
Well, Yale is a pretty worthy cause, we believe.
I mean, obviously we're volunteers and we put in a lot of hours.
And we do it for the joy of seeing the show come across and seeing so many people on the Expo floor.
It's quite a rush to see a shoulder shoulder people in the aisle.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And what do you guys see as the future of scale itself?
It's going to be something that's something we're all kind of talking about and what, you know, where to go next.
It's going to be interesting to see what happens over the next couple of years as, you know, as regional shows start to be more of the focus.
It seems that there's a Linux and open source events, you know, similar to our own popping up in every corner.
There's, you know, there's the one we mentioned in Ohio.
There's two in Florida.
There's one in Atlanta.
There's another one in Indiana as well as, you know, North Carolina.
So they're all over the place.
And I'm sorry, I forgot to mention Linux Fest Northwest, which is up in Seattle.
And it seems like each year there's another one or two being founded.
So it's going to be interesting to see how all the events start to, you know, where we can find ways to collaborate as well as, you know, how the community takes to them and starts maybe moving away from some of the more national events.
Cool.
Cool.
Another thing that's interesting, although we're the two things interesting about scale, it's the SoCal Linux Expo Bo.
But I've been noticing, I think last year, 15% of our ticket sales came from out of state.
Quite a few from the East Coast and the like.
So we may be a regional show, but we're increasingly drawing nationally.
And the other thing is we have Linux in the title, but we're not, you know, exclusive Linux.
Last year, we had all three BSDs there.
We had HIKU. We had React OS.
So when it comes to the flavor of the OS, we're kind of agnostic as long as it meets the litmus test to being open source software.
Very cool.
Very cool.
We just couldn't figure out an acronym to replace scale that would be pronounceable.
There's been a number of recommendations that a lot of times they end up sounding like diseases.
So we try to stay away from this.
Yeah.
People like it with the wrong idea.
A single syllable acronym is probably about as good as we'll ever do the scale.
Yep.
Hard to believe we're on the seventh year already, Elon.
Yeah.
When we kicked this off, I was just barely starting my first year of college.
And that's been what, seven years now, well?
Yeah.
The posters we printed for the first one said, first annual.
So we were really optimistic back then that there would be a second one.
Yep.
So.
Very cool.
Very cool.
Well.
What do you both see?
Do you expect some groups that you mentioned, the education women in open source?
Do you expect those to grow at light, tremendous rates or anything?
We try to do those events as something new every year, although we've been in the last couple of years.
We seem to stick to a few topics just because they've been successful.
Our goals with those are really to foster new events.
What we did with one of the events that we recently spun off is the demonstrating open source healthcare solutions event that's going to be held at scale this year.
But it's no longer run by the scale organizers.
It got to the point where it was large enough and successful enough on its own to kind of sustain itself.
So, you know, some of the committee members around that took that and turned it into their own event.
And we're, I think we're happy to do that with as many events as we can.
We really want to be a bit of an incubator for the community, help build up new events, help build up new educational opportunities, and then see if they can fly.
Yeah, you know, who knows if somebody says, hey, I want to do a one-day conference at scale and open source software for manufacturing or marketing or something.
I might start them off with a single track one year, like we did with docs, the healthcare track.
The first year was a single track.
And then the next two years it was two tracks.
And the other two are still single track, but, you know, we're always willing to try something new.
Cool.
So, I just wanted to take a minute and, you know, I know that you played our, I think you played our promo code, our audio promo in the past.
I just mentioned that, you know, registration for scale is still open on if, you know, anybody wants to check out that, you know, register for the event or get more details about it.
It's www.soCalLinuxExpo.org.
And, you know, if they use the promo code podcast, or I'm sorry, if they use the promo code Cast, C-A-S-T, they'll, you know, they'll get a 40% off, I believe it is.
So, off registration.
And that's February 20th through the 22nd.
But the early bird registration expires on the 19th, evening of the 19th, which is five days from now, and the registration price goes up after that.
So, if they are thinking about attending scale, they should do it this week.
Yep.
Register, I mean.
Yeah.
Very cool.
Well, I came to the, I've come to the end of my prepared questions.
So, I don't know what else I can say.
Do you have anything else to add, Elon?
I think we've done a pretty good job of covering it all today.
I just want to, again, invite everybody to, you know, attend the show in February.
And, you know, if you get a chance to stop by and, you know, look for either over myself or any other guys and just say hello.
And, you know, we're always looking to meet all of our attendees, although there's, these days, there seems to be too many to shake everybody's hands.
Yeah. I can't even keep track of all the press people that show up anymore.
Yeah.
Like you said before we started recording, there's no bad publicity.
Growth is good.
Yeah.
All right. Well, I want to thank you both for being on the show.
I know I had fun. I know that I found very informative.
We're happy to be here.
Yeah, we're happy to be here as well.
And, if anybody's out there listening, when will this be airing, you know?
Sometimes within the next...
We try to release the show...
We try to release a new show every day.
Okay.
So, while it's...
If I'm as interested, it will also be on the Linux link text show this week.
So, you know, we'd love to have people joining on IRC channel and ask us questions if they're interested.
Cool.
All righty.
Thank you all for listening.
And we'll see you all next time.
Bye-bye now.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye. Thank you.
Thank you all.
Thank you all for listening to H.P.R. sponsored by Carol.net.
She'll head on over to C.A.R.O.N.T. for all of her TV.
Thank you all.
Bye-bye.