Who will be the keynote presenters at LinuxWorld Boston 2006?

With LinuxWorld Expo 2006 in Boston just two weeks away, here’s a look at some highlights of the upcoming event.

The main event, I’d have to say, will be a keynote from Microsoft. That’s right. The Window Boys – and not Johnny Pesky and Sal Bertolami (a Boston reference for locals attending the show) – have had a presence at LinuxWorld for several years, and now Bill Hiff, Microsoft’s director of technical platform strategy will keynote on Thursday. His theme will be “Interoperability: Dealing with the Diversity and Heterogeneity of Today’s IT Marketplace.” How he is received by the crowd will be interesting to watch.

The main keynote for the show is no slouch either: Nicholas Negroponte, ‘Net pioneer and chairman and co-founder of MIT Media Lab will discuss his $100 Linux laptop project in a session called “The $100 Laptop: Linux Attacks the Digital Divide.” Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child program involves the development of these low-cost, hand-crankable devices aimed at giving poor school children worldwide an affordable PC and Internet browsing platform. He speaks on Tuesday to kick off the show.

From the user community, Bob Gatewood, CTO of AthenaHealth – a Massachusetts-based healthcare group – will discuss how he runs most of the company’s critical back-end IT infrastructure on Linux and open source.

Next week, I’ll have a rundown of Linux and open source product news expected to hit the week of the show.