OpenSourceDays

For the last ten years, the LinuxForum has been the annual event for all Danish (and other Scandinavian) people with interest in open source. The conference has been growing over the years and the team behind it has decided to change the name and scope. This is what they explain:

The highly successful open source conference "Linuxforum", which has already celebrated it's 10th anniversary is now changing name to Open Source Days in order to better reflect that Linux by no means is the only topic of the conference.
The name Open Source Days indicates that during the confererence a vast selection of technical and business open source topics will be covered by the best selection of speakers in a mix between Danish and English.
Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, OpenSolaris and other open operating systems - and all of the applications running of these operating systems will be in focus during Open Source Days 2008.

Read more here: http://www.opensourcedays.org/2008/

The conference will be held October 3th. and 4th. http://www.opensourcedays.org/2008/about/

To better support the continuously growing event, the coordinators has decided to establish a foundation. The formal establishment meeting will take place on January 8th. at Niels Bohr Institutet in Copenhagen. Read more about the meeting here: http://friends.opensourcedays.org/

Show up and join.

And the award goes to ....

Oh - sorry. We don't have an award. Sorry, the bill will be sent to ....

Contests are fine. I might even participate myself. Its a fine way to get new contributers out of the bushes. The problem is, that a contest only takes what comes in the limited contest period. A lot of people are doing a big contribution every day. Both when a contest is running and between. What about that effort. Shouldn't that be rewarded as well ?

Sun Microsystems has announced that they will support the Sun driven open source projects with an amount of 1 million dollars.

http://www.sun.com/software/opensource/awards/index.jsp . Contest will be published within the individual projects soon. These projects are GlassFish, NetBeans, OpenJDK, OpenOffice.org, OpenSolaris and OpenSPARC.
You can find the announcement from Sun here: http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20071205005370&newsLang=en.

The contest for openOffice.org has not been published yet, bur further details is promised before the Christmas holidays. It'sinteresting to see what they will come up with this time.

I suggest that some of the money from Sun should be used to establish an international annual open source award. The award can be given to a person, organization or OS project that has contributed to open source in general or an individual project in particular.

I'm also thinking domestic. In Denmark we have had an annual event now for a decade, called LinuxForum. From 2008 the event has changed name to Open Source Days ( http://www.opensourcedays.org ) because the event isn't just Linux.

Why don't we establish a domestic open source award.