If you miss this final chance to submit a paper you may well miss out on your opportunity to present!

In addition to being a presenter there are several other opportunities to contribute to the Utah Open Source Conference, such as volunteering your time or conducting a BoF get together.

Check out http://blog.utos.org and http://2010.utosc.com for all the latest opportunities to help out this year!

The Utah Open Source Conference 2009 will be focusing on the developer, but we also have presentation tracks that apply to the beginner and the business person”, stated Clint Savage, founder of the Utah Open Source Foundation.

The conference, now in its third year, is designed to help developers strengthen their skill and to teach them about the latest open source technologies.

See the official press release:  Utah Open Source Conference 2009 Dates, Venue and Theme

To keep up-to-date on the latest news, visit the Utah Open Source Foundation at these locations:

http://blog.utos.org – Utah Open Source Blog
http://2009.utosc.com – Utah Open Source Conference 2009 Website

In addition, feel free to follow Utah Open Source on these social networks:

#utos on irc.freenode.net
http://identi.ca/utos – Utah Open Source on Identi.ca
http://www.linkedin.com/groups?home=&gid=3406&trk=anet_ug_hm – Utah Open Source LinkedIn Group
http://twitter.com/utos – Utah Open Source on Twitter
http://www.flickr.com/groups/utosc/ – Flickr photos from previous years

Now that you have seen the theme for UTOSC 2009.  Let’s talk about the three tenets of the UTOSC 2009 theme.

Affordability

Affordability doesn’t just mean cost, it also means value. Free and open source software (FOSS) provides this value. Not only in it’s low costs (aka free as in beer), but in it’s maintenance costs being only those of expertise. No contracts to sign, no company to ask for improvements, and value added because you can make the change yourself. In addition, because expertise is generally the only cost, companies that use free software won’t feel locked in when looking for support options.

Scalability

Scalability means many things to many people: flexibility of costs, software load management, ability to grow without complication, and many more. Scalability makes things better. Free and open source software provides solutions in every area from customer management to security, and simple applications to complex environments. Because code is so easy to view and change, FOSS has the most flexible, scalable solutions around.

Reliability

Reliability is among the most important components in free and open source software. The number of eyes looking at the code, and the community that helps make the software, provides a paradigm which sets FOSS apart. Being able to make changes and have a community willing to test the software makes it more reliable and solid. If you want reliability, you go with free and open source software, its community of developers, testers, and users.

These three components of the Utah Open Source Conference 2009 will excite the mind, challenge the soul and ultimately improve free and open source software. We at the Utah Open Source Foundation look forward to seeing your presentation, thoughts and enjoyment of this theme during the upcoming UTOSC 2009.

See you all at the Utah Open Source Conference 2009. Watch for the announcement of the venue and conference dates in the next couple days.

Cheers,

Clint Savage
Founder, Utah Open Source Foundation

Matt Asay at UTOSC 2008

Matt Asay presented on Friday morning, 29 August.

Christer Edwards

Christer Edwards, instructor for Guru Labs and Ubuntu-Utah member presented on Saturday, 30 August 2008 on Ubuntu in the Enterprise.

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Joe Brockmeier

Joe Brockmeier, the OpenSUSE Community Manager for Novell, spoke on Friday, 29 August, about bootstrapping communities and OpenSUSE.

PLUG was first formed in 1994 by two then-students at BYU, Thayne Harbaugh and Mike Handy. Thayne and Mike had wanted to form an on-campus student organization for enthusiasts of Linux, but were unable to find a faculty member willing to sponsor its creation. Undaunted, they created PLUG as an off-campus organization.

This was during the early days of Linux and the Internet. The fact the plug.org domain name was available is one example of how early this was; The Intel Pentium CPU was brand new and most geeks were running 386 and 486 CPUs with less than 1GB of hard drive space; Internet service was still a novelty and most connections were made over serial modems at 9600 bps to 14.4Kbps.

The Linux community was young, still driven mostly by volunteers coordinating through online groups. However, 1994 would be the year Red Hat, SuSE, and Caldera would all release the first versions of their respective distributions, thus kicking off the fast-paced commercial Linux distribution race.

PLUG began holding its meetings the second Wednesday of every month — a tradition that has stood the test of time — at various venues around Utah Valley including the Canyon Park campus, The Palace, and at CEDO.

After the first five years of PLUG, the original founders were either moving out of the area, getting busy with work-related (Linux, of course) tasks, or just feeling it was time to pass the torch. Jason “Jayce^” Hall suddenly found himself holding said torch and carried PLUG through the next several exciting years until 2007 when Jason stepped aside to become more involved with UTOS and Ryan Simpkins took the helm.

Over the years PLUG has hosted several special engagements with impressive speakers such as John Terpstra and Steve French of the Samba project, Perl guru and O’Reilly author Damian Conway, and Miguel de Icaza of the Gnome project. Over the course of several Summers, PLUG has held annual barbecues for members and their families which also included surplus swap meets where members could trade or sell old hardware.

PLUG has a member mailing list which varies in the amount of traffic it gets. Most of the time, the list sees fairly low to moderate traffic, but occasionally will fill its members’ mailboxes with spurts of off-topic discussions. PLUG hosts archives of these highly intellectual discussions at http://plug.org/pipermail/plug.

The PLUG website is firmly located at http://www.plug.org/ and, as mentioned above, meets (with some very, very rare exceptions) the second Wednesday of each month at the Omniture building in the Canyon Park campus.

In the future, UTOSF plans to make this a regular article released near the end of every month, so come by and see how we’re improving our community.

Utah Open Source Planet

The Utah Open Source Planet, run by Gabriel Gunderson can be accessed in another way, from Utah Open Source Foundation. Point your browser to http://planet.utos.org and receive the latest and greatest local Utah bloggers talking about everything from linux to food to programming to weight loss. These people are part of Utah Open Source and have a good nose for what’s going on in tech and open source in Utah. Please join us by participating in Utah Open Source Planet. Its a great blog community.

Streaming

UTOSF is proud to announce that we will provide streamed user group (UG) meetings. Utah Open Source Foundation (UTOSF) is spearheading an effort to get a streaming server up and running. We’ve taken into considerations things like bandwidth concerns, server power, usefulness of topic and much more. As such, we’ll be attempting to stream more and more meetings, events and other discussions this year for the UGs. The current plan is to cover most of the known user groups (UGs) by end of year 2008.

We need help from you to accomplish this. UTOSF is providing the hardware, bandwidth and configuration for anyone who’s willing to record their UG meeting. We want to find people who are regulars in each of the communities and help them set up the recording software. If you are interested, please contact clint@utos.org or jayce@utos.org for more information.

Conference Videos

We’re still learning here, so please bear with us. We’ve had a lot of requests regarding when the recordings of UTOSC 2007 will be released. I’d like to say that I have *actually* seen one and OpenSourceTV and KnowledgeBlue are doing a great job getting these together. I’m excited to see how the rest turn out. The videos will be released as we get them. There will be regular announcements on http://utosf.org so continue to watch for updates.

Multi-Distro Release Party

Only once in a great while will we see an event like this one. Only once will there be so many shiny new distributions to choose from. Only once will OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, OpenBSD and Fedora be released within one month of each other. Because of this The Utah Open Source Foundation is announcing the first and probably the only Multi-Distro Release Party in Utah. The release party will involve four major distros, plus anyone is welcome to bring their own distro to hand out.

The party will be held on Saturday, November 10, from 1-5pm at the Open Source Technology Center at Novell. We’ll have a few short presentations about the three released distributions, food and a large network install server for the Installfest. We hope to see you all there!

Where: Open Source Technology Center at Novell
Map: http://tinyurl.com/yprnqr
When: Saturday, November 10, 2007 1pm-5pm MST
What: Installfest, pizza, drinks and more.

You Can Help

I’d like to invite those interested in helping the Utah Open Source Conference 2008 to start attending the upcoming Conference planning meetings. Reply with the subject “Conference Planning” if you are interested in helping.

In addition, the Utah Open Source Foundation will begin regular “meets”. We’re planning on inviting leadership of each of the UGs, plus anyone interested in helping the community as a whole. UTOSF is dedicated to helping the groups by providing resources, tools and other benefits. Come and be a part of something great!

Cheers,

Clint Savage

Register today to get the discounted rate of $55 if you contact your SIG Leadership today!

https://register.utosc.org/

For more information visit:

http://www.utosc.org

SCHEDULE

Come check out the schedule. Its being updated daily, many presentations are are available, more to come.

The schedule is available at http://www.utosc.org/schedule.

https://register.utosc.org/

For more information visit:

http://www.utosc.org

SCHEDULE

Come check out the schedule. Its being updated daily, many presentations are are available, more to come.

The schedule is available at http://www.utosc.org/schedule.

Converting your registration is easy. Login to https://register.utosc.org/?Step=7 with the email address and confirmation code you were given. Update your information if you like and choose the option “Attend Full Conference”.

An email was recently sent informing you of this option and if you can find that email, you’ll also be able to determine how to get into the full conference for a measly $40 total. The price does jump to $55 at the end of this week, so register soon!

With over 30 presentations, opportunities for glorious swag and networking opportunities with others right here in Utah, why not sign up today. In fact, all proceeds from the conference go toward promoting open source in Utah and overall growth of the Utah Open Source communities at large.

If you haven’t already, sign up today: https://register.utosc.org. Get your discount codes from SIG leadership and get in for only $55. More information is available at our website, http://www.utosc.org.

See you all there.

Cheers,

Clint Savage
Founder, Utah Open Source Conference