SELF Discovery

The 2015 SouthEast LinuxFest (SELF) made its seventh annual appearance last week, this year filling the quiet halls of the Sheraton Charlotte Airport with the voices of the free and open source community.

This was my first time at the show, but it is most definitely a local favorite for those Red Hatters based in Raleigh. Charlotte is a city in transition, with some interesting spots to find culture and ridiculously good cuisine. The event itself had the feel of similar regional FLOSS conferences, along the lines of SCALE, Texas Linux Fest, and LinuxFest Northwest: run by a team of dedicated (and slightly exhausted) volunteers that went out of their way to make attendees and exhibitors feel welcome.

OSAS was well-represented at SELF, presenting on a variety of topics that displayed just some of our expertise.

Presentation SELFies

Tom Callaway, Gluster Community Lead, gave his popular and funny talk on Understanding FOSS Licenses, including a primer on why licenses for the dead are most likely non-free.

Later, Tom joined Community Leadership Manager Ruth Suehle to present on a topic which they are certainly expert: Raspberry Pi Hacks.

Joe Brockmeier also made the trip to Charlotte, giving two talks in his role as Project Atomic Community Manager. The first was this excellent introduction, All You Wanted to Know About Linux Containers.

On Sunday, Joe continued his container series with Containers and the Future of Open Source Software Delivery.

My own talk, "It's Metaphors All the Way Down," seemed to be well-received, though sadly the feed seems to have been interrupted, so I won't embed the video here. It, and other talks by such notables as Deb Nicholson, Russ Pavlicek, and Dave Nalley, have been uploaded to YouTube.

In all, the conference itself was another positive example of how the community is most effective: sharing what it knows with newcomers and experts alike and moving free and open source software and hardware forward.