For the second year in a row since I moved to Redmond, I’ll be joining the Microsoft crew sponsoring and attending LinuxFest Northwest in Bellingham, Washington. This is one of the largest, if not the largest Linux & open source event in the region and draws large crowds of smart geeks from Canada, the United States and other countries, as well as corporate sponsors like us.
One of the questions I get the most is why does Microsoft sponsors and participates this event? Microsoft has been sponsoring and participating in many open source conferences, projects and events in many parts of the world but some people are wondering why a non-corporate, pure Linux event, and some others are naturally skeptical about it.
I don’t think there’s a single reason why we rally to convince our bosses to do it, but we have been trying to do more closer to home, when it comes to open source. There is a vibrant Linux and open source ecosystem in Redmond, the Puget Sound area and the Pacific Northwest and while we have been very active in Europe and in the Bay Area, we haven’t done a good job of connecting with the people closer to home.
For example, I recently had the fantastic opportunity to help the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network from the University of Washington to run their Ubuntu-based Node.js applications for their “Quake Shake“. I think being able to help with that project or with any other project or conference in any other part of the globe is a good thing – but there’s no distance excuse for Bellingham!
Another great reason is the LFNW community itself. We love the crowd, the lively discussions, the sharing and learning spirit. And as long as we are welcome by the community we’ll continue to seek opportunities to connect with it. Plus, this is a really cool conference. This year, I’m cutting my vacations to attend the event. A coworker is skipping church duty to help. We have heard from many engineers and program managers that they will be attending and want to carpool and staff the booth. And my friend has been investing all this time in logistic ensuring we are having a meaningful presence.
The community invites some of the sponsors to bring unique content that is relevant to the participants. Last year I had the opportunity to demo a Raspberry Pi device connected to Office via Azure. Most people in the room didn’t know Office runs in a browser, or that Azure could run Linux. But they listened and they thought it was cool. Some of them are now partners, helping customers do more with open source in Azure.
This year, I want to bring more Debian to this event because I have been working a lot inside of Microsoft to get more people up to speed with Debian-based development and we have serious community momentum around Debian in Azure. In true Microsoft tradition, we will have a cake to celebrate the arrival of Debian 8. I’ll have in mind all of those friends in the Debian community with whom I’ve been working with for years to make sure we don’t drop the ball when it comes to responding to what our customers, partners and the community want when it comes to Debian.
And, hopefully, next year we’ll be back again in Bellingham for LinuxFest Northwest 2016!
