This past weekend I didn't watch baseball, World Cup soccer, or basketball; instead I sponsored a hallway table in a Marriott hotel in Spartanburg, SC to meet, discuss, and argue over all things open source at the SouthEast LinuxFest. Over 500 open source enthusiasts took part in this 3 day event with speaker sessions, birds of a feather group meetings, training sessions, keynotes, and the always popular discussion over a beer. Famous people also making an appearance were Jon "maddog" Hall, Dave Yates from Lotta Linux Links, and Jono Bacon as well as soon to be famous people such as D. Richard Hipp, author of SQLite. As this was an open source event, attendees were properly dressed in t-shirts with no suits allowed creating an informal setting for people to discuss various open source topics as well as learn about new projects and media outlets. To give you a feel for the event, which is a typical open source event, I took some video with various people at the event as well as Jeremy Sands, the event chairman.
Jeremy Sands Video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUzNl1crsgk
SE LinuxFest Tour Video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGgTNVd5gSE
I also came across some media outlets that are great sources of information for people to learn about Linux and open source: * The Linux Link Tech Show <http://www.tllts.org/> who operate a weekly online radio show on Linux every Wednesday at 8:30pm and have been since 2003
* Linux in the Ham Shack <http://lhspodcast.info> - podcast for ham radio operators to learn more about open source solutions for ham radios
I will be posting a few more interviews I did tomorrow with a 15 year old from the Fedora community, a KDE community promoter, and an interesting TryIt online open source solution from click2try.