Red Hat Headlines Southern California Linux Expo

Company Experts Address Topics Including Community Building and the Open Source Legal System; The Fedora Project Hosts Activity Day

RALEIGH, N.C. - —
Red Hat, Inc. (NYSE: RHT), the world's leading provider of open source solutions, and the Fedora Project, a Red Hat sponsored and community-supported open source collaboration project, today announced they will deliver a keynote address and additional presentations at the eighth annual Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE). SCALE is one of the largest Linux conferences in the region, attracting enterprise and industry professionals along with smaller businesses, non-profit industries and Linux enthusiasts.
 
Red Hat is a successful business that seeks to act as an effective catalyst in communities not only in open source software, but also in education, government, the law, business and social activism. Red Hat's Karsten Wade, senior community architect, will deliver the keynote address entitled "Being a Catalyst in Communities - The Scientific Facts About the Open Source Way." Wade will outline a specific set of guidelines for practicing the open source way in communities. This includes detailing a short guide "The Open Source Way: Creating and Nurturing Communities of Contributors," which is an open, community-written guide for following the open source way in any type of community building effort. While there are other books written on how communities are successful, this guide presents a new opportunity for a solution-driven community handbook written by the communities it serves.
 
Open source exists in tension with the country-specific system of intellectual property law that underlies it. In his SCALE session entitled "Improving the Open Source Legal System," Red Hat's Richard Fontana, open source licensing and patent counsel, will argue that open source can be usefully regarded as a distinct international system of property rights transfer masquerading as a form of copyright licensing, based not on statutes or court decisions but on norms of code sharing practices that are rooted in developer custom and tradition. Fontana will argue that the predictability surrounding open source licensing should be enhanced by achieving better community understanding, and legitimization, of this tradition-based legal system, and by developing better means of dispute resolution.
 
Fedora will also host a Fedora Activity Day (FAD) at SCALE on Friday, Feb. 19, 2010. During this mini-conference, the Fedora Ambassador team will focus on preparing the Fedora Project/JBoss.org joint mentoring organization for the upcoming 2010 Google Summer of Code. Team members will create process and how-to content, find and solve mentor problems, and educate the wider JBoss.org and Fedora projects about how participation is conducted this year. The work prepares the organization for improving capacity for more students and mentors even beyond the Summer of Code efforts.
 
Participating in the Summer of Code has already brought Fedora and JBoss improved project infrastructure, new software and new associates for Red Hat, and strengthened ties with existing contributors and upstream projects. It has made the projects more efficient, provided valuable mentor training and contributed to open source solutions in new areas. For example, Transifex.net is a community translation tool and open source business that started as a Summer of Code project in the Fedora Project, and now provides the back-end for Fedora translations as well as hundreds of other open source projects.
 
WHERE:
 
8th Annual Southern California Linux Expo
 
 
Westin Hotel LA Airport, Los Angeles
 
WHEN:
 
- Friday, Feb. 19, 2010, 9:00 a.m. - 6:30 p.m. PST
 
 
Fedora Activity Day, Kennedy Room
 
 
- Saturday, Feb. 20, 2010, 10:00-11:00 a.m. PST
 
 
Being a Catalyst in Communities - The Scientific Facts About the Open Source Way, Karsten Wade
 
 
- Sunday, Feb. 21, 2010, 4:30-5:30 p.m. PST
 
 
Improving the Open Source Legal System, Richard Fontana
For more information on SCALE, please visit www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale8x/.
 
For more information about Red Hat, visit www.redhat.com. For more information about Fedora, visit www.fedoraproject.org. For more news, more often, visit www.press.redhat.com.
  • About Red Hat

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