I had a great time at LinuxCon this week, and I loved that it was held here in Portland, OR. My favorite part of the event was running into old friends and ex-coworkers from my days at Intel who I haven’t seen in ages. It was great catching up with everyone, and I even managed to introduce a few of them to Whiffies and some of my other favorite food carts for quick lunches or late night snacks.

I did a much longer review of the event over on the Olliance Blog, but I wanted to highlight a few things here on Fast Wonder, too.

Community.

I love the sense of community that you get at conferences where most of the audience members are open source developers. People with laptops were clustered together in little groups having conversations, working on code, and eating Voodoo donuts (how many conferences have strangely colored donuts covered with things like bacon and breakfast cereal?)

My favorite community-related session was a keynote by Bdale Garbee on The Freedom to Collaborate. Much of what he said is common knowledge for those us in the open source world, but it got me thinking more about how companies and communities interact. I won’t duplicate everything here, but I wrote several paragraphs with my thoughts on this session on the Olliance Blog.

Linus Torvalds. The Linux Kernel Roundtable was one of the most popular sessions with a room full of geeks listening to Linus and other kernel developers talk about various Linux kernel topics.

Moblin. This was a hot topic at the event, and I’m not just saying this because Intel is a client. People were talking about Moblin in hallways and presenters kept mentioning them in sessions. This was a Linux Foundation event, and Moblin was turned over to the Linux Foundation by Intel in early April, so that could explain at least some of the buzz.

Fun. We had the Fake Linus Torvalds contest where Matt Asay came out ahead of Dan Lyons (the famous FakeSteveJobs guy). We even had an appearance from Steve Ballmer, or maybe it was Jeremy Allison as Steve Ballmer at the Golden Penguin Bowl, which was filled with funny geek trivia and a live helicopter battle.

If you want to know more about LinuxCon, you can read my longer review of the event.