LCA This year Builder AU will be updating the latest happenings from Linux.conf.au 2005 live from Canberra. We will be covering the latest news, exclusive interviews, and blogs from readers, attendees and speakers at the conference.

Staged at the Australian National University in Canberra, the event will be held between from Wednesday April 20 to Saturday April 23, 2005. Prior to the main conference, two days of mini-conferences will be held starting on April 18, and the Australian UNIX and Open Systems Users Group (AUUG) will be hosting the second Australian Open Computing in Government Conference (OCG) on Monday April 18 and Tuesday April 19.

This year's speaker roster includes both Australian and international open-source developers, and provide an opportunity for local developers and IT professionals to gain hands-on experience with open-source technologies.

So, if you are attending Linux.conf.au 2005 or cannot make it and want to know the latest news, stay tuned to this page for our complete coverage.

Check out the official LCA 2005 Web site for the full agenda of the event.


Bugs threaten Linux stability, Morton warns
A lack of commitment to testing by the Linux community may ultimately threaten the stability of the operating system, Linux kernel co-maintainer Andrew Morton has warned. Read more


Rift divides FOSS community, says Linux body
Linux Australia's immediate past president reckons moderate open source developers are being pushed into "a refugee situation" between the 'free software' and 'commercial' hardliners. Read more


Malcolm flays Aust patent authorities
An expensive and ineffective patent regime is hampering the work of Australia's software community, a leading IT lawyer claimed yesterday. Read more


Tridgell speaks out in Bitkeeper war
Andrew Tridgell has made his first public comments on the dispute between himself and Linux originator Linus Torvalds over source code management for the Linux kernel, describing much of the coverage and commentary on the issue as "trivial and crazy".Read more


Aussie lawyer wants 'clearer' GPL
Australian open source lawyer Brendan Scott says the next version of the GNU General Public License (GPL) should be made clearer and include legal terms relevant to jurisdictions like Australia.Read more


Feds stomp on Red Hat
A senior federal official has rebuked Linux vendor Red Hat over its criticism of the government's open-source software (OSS) takeup rate, arguing a measured approach may be "the right thing to do".Read more


Microsoft cops standards attack
Microsoft Australia has come under fire from rival vendors and open-source advocates for keeping its Office document standards proprietary. Read more


Favour us over proprietary software: FOSS advocates
Federal politicians should dump their policy of procurement neutrality and actively encourage agencies to adopt open source software, OSS supporters claim. Read more


Ignore 'fads' when examining OSS: Govt
Federal government agencies must "disregard any industry fads or novelty value" when assessing open-source software for procurement, according to a new guide. Read more


Microsoft to talk open computing in government
Microsoft will sit down this April with policy makers, IT officials and open source vendors at the second Open Computing in Government Conference (OCG) in Canberra to talk about how open computing can aid in the provision of services by government. Read more


AUUG set for govt open computing conference
The Australian Unix and Open Systems Users Group (AUUG) has drawn in several key speakers for its second annual Australian Open Computing in Government conference. Read more


13 year-old gets presenters' slot at linux.conf.au
Thirteen-year-old Elizabeth Garbee may not know as much about Linux as her father Bdale Garbee, Linux CTO for Hewlett Packard and former Debian Project Leader, but that won't stop her from presenting at linux.conf.au 2005. Read more


PHP creator: Rasmus Lerdof
Builder Australia caught up with PHP innovator Rasmus Lerdorf, to find out about the success of PHP, the open source movement around the world, other scripting languages and what we can expect to see in the next generation of the dynamic scripting language. Read more

Developer Spotlight: Martin Pool
Martin Pool is a software engineer working on open source software for Canonical. In 2003 he won the Australian Unix and Open Systems' Australian Open Souce Award for his work on the distcc distributed compiler. Builder AU caught up with Martin in 2004 to talk about his work, SCO and open source software. Read more

Interview with Alan Cox
At LCA 2003 one of the head programmers behind Linux, Alan Cox talked to Builder Australia about the uptake of Linux, Microsoft's plans to share its source code and his Linux predictions. Read more
Lock up your daughters' ..
Michael Ellerman writes ".. computers. LCA is in town, and there's bands of nerds prowling the streets looking for their next innocent victim." Read more.

Wedding and LCA - in that order :)
Pia Waugh writes "LCA has ROCKED WAY HARD!!!! I have had heaps of fun, given three talks (two to gov and one to the main conference) and I think I've achieved what I set out for. A whole raft of people are inspired to kick ass and a lot of issues I've been concerned about are off my chest :) I really love this conference, and the community." Read more.

LCA2005 - Jeremy Malcolm, the champion
Leon Brooks writes "The saga of Jeremy's presentation reads like one of those stress-tester jokes. His (Mac) laptop wouldn't sync with the projector. Then NeoOfficeJ crashed. And crashed again. And put the presentation on the background, leaving shells etc over the top of it. And scaled it, er, interestingly. Jeremy started everything from scratch a few times, all to no avail, then finally asked if anyone in the audience had a laptop." Read more.

Who was that guy?
Michael Still writes "Who was that masked Debian guy? his name is Bdale Garbee, and he's a long time Debian hacker. He is HP's Linux CTO." Read more.

GNOME.conf.au; Toast
Tim Riley writes "I caught the second half of GNOME.conf.au yesterday afternoon. What made the event even better this year than last year was that it was far more interactive. Jeff guided a discussion on Topaz, the sometime-in-the-future 3.0 release. Luis Villa has written his thoughts on the topic after the GCA discussion. It's pretty hard to disagree with his reasoning." Read more.

LCA05
Ryan Verner writes "LCA has been rather interesting so far; caught bits of the Audioconf and Debconf today along with hacking on random bits of stuff, some video related. Way too much great content, not enough time to see it all. I'm really amazed how far the state of audio software in Linux has come since LCA04; there seems to be massive inertia with multimedia stuff lately, it's taken off incredibly (evident with a whole pleothra of projects)"." Read more.

Day Two
Michael Davies writes "So Day Two (Tuesday) went well. The GNOME.conf.au miniconf went all day, and was pretty cool. Got to hear Luis Villa speak for the first time which was great. Lots of good ideas flowing around, in addition to the usual call for more people to get involved and also to get involved in grass-root evangelism as well." Read more.

hangin' out, down the street
Davyd Madeley writes "We had the GNOME miniconf today, GNOME.conf.au. Gave my talk, which didn't go too badly. The slides aren't really crash hot, and I don't think that our talks were recorded, so no one is really going to appreciate how (surprisingly) passable my talk was. I know Michael Davies took some photos, but they don't appear to be online."." Read more.

LCA Day #1 / OOo MiniConf
Colin Charles writes "Today was Day #1 of the OpenOffice.org MiniConf. Simon Phipps, Chief Technology Evangelist at Sun sort of wrapped around a talk, and not agreeing with him at many stages happened I guess. Silly talk about licensing and software patents, and beating up of the -Even Red Hat recommends Windows for desktops"." Read more.

So linux.conf.au has begun for 2005!
Tim Riley writes "Today was the first day of the miniconferences. The Debian miniconf was well-attended and had some interesting talks. Bdale gave a 'state of the nation' address and his deep knowledge of the project really shone through in his musings and in the discussion during the question period at the end of his talk. " Read more.

Twas the night before lca2005
Andrew Pollock writes "I started the day with a couple of airport pickup runs, picking up some Debian developers and dropping them at their accomodation. I also introduced Mako to Vegemite and Tim Tams, which I'm sure he'll be blogging about... " Read more.

It's leaking captain!
Michael Still writes "Information about the LCA video stuff seems to be leaking out... I don't think that's a big problem, but it hasn't been officially announced yet. I assume that happens sometime tomorrow. " Read more.

linux.conf.au 2005 is go
Steven Hanley writes "No one else on the ground at lca has talked about the conference yet, I guess because the rest of the crew are too busy and the delegates are too excited. Anyway all is cool, people are here and doing early sign in, vibe is happening." Read more.

SC 0.9 Release
Chris Yeoh writes "Just released 0.9 of the Spellcast code. Had a test game with Rusty today, and although the test gui is pretty dodgy (hopefully contestants will come up with something much better!), the server held up really well and we only discovered a couple of minor bugs. I think we're going to get some quite interesting entries for the competition. " Read more.

For a full list of all blogs from the conference check out Planet LCA 2005.

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