This morning I walked to Bella Center in Copenhagen just in time for the Ubuntu Enterprise Summit.
It's the business conference of Canonical, the supporters of the Ubuntu Linux distribution. There were various lectures all day. It was aimed to the business side of open source software (not an oxymoron), but I got a lot out of it. I learned that Windows XP support is ending and Windows 8 is "jarring and bizarre," so of course they hope that everyone will make the switch to Linux now. I learned that every day more than 570 man-years are spent playing angry birds. They also demoed some of their new server management tools, but I think the most valuable thing for me was to get a better glimpse into the modern cloud computing architecture.
There were a lot of businessmen in suits who took themselves a little too seriously, and a lot of hackers in XKCD T-shirts, so I fit in well with my Einstein T-shirt. If I had a Bohr T-shirt, I would've worn it.
At lunch I saw one of my personal heroes, Mark Shuttleworth, who gives tens of millions of his own British pounds to support open-source software development. I want to do that someday. At lunch I talked to him a little about Webkit (because I wanted something intelligent to say), and asked if I could take our picture for my blog.
In the afternoon there were some more lectures, a Q&A panel with some of the leaders, and some fancy Danish hors d'oeuvres, which aren't quite as French as the French hors d'oeuvres I had a few weeks ago. I rode the train back. There are a lot of interesting conversations on the train going away from a Linux developer conference. I ended up going to a late but delicious dinner with some graphics card driver developers. I fit in quite well: they were talking about the Planck's constant, and I had Max Planck's biography in my pocket.
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