[penguicon-general] Tech Nifties?

[Rob Landley]

On Friday 15 September 2006 1:29 pm, Matt Arnold wrote:
> Linux Journal article "Who Are The Hacker Bloggers?" gave me some
> ideas for people to keep an eye on through their RSS feeds.
> http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/1000094
> 
> Who knows, perhaps we could get some of them for Tech Nifties? In many
> cases, they'd make excellent Tech GoHs for a future year.
> 
> Mark Shuttleworth. By day, a billionaire playboy who takes tourism
> trips to space. By night, he dons the utility belt in the Canonical,
> Inc batcave, and brings into existence: Ubuntu Linux!
> http://www.markshuttleworth.com/

Mark Shuttleworth would be a killer GoH.  He's probably the second most 
important person in the Linux community right now after Linux himself.

If you have _any_ chance of getting him, he'd be worth it.

> Ian Murdock, whose name put the "ian" in "Debian"
> http://ianmurdock.com/?page_id=215

Cool for historical reasons, but hasn't done anything of significant interest 
for a very long time (about a decade; he handed Debian off to Bruce Perens, 
and Perens handed it off in...  96?  98?)

He'd probably still qualify as a GoH, but not a strong one.  The only real 
advantage is there might not be many other demands on his time, so we'd have 
a better chance of getting him.

> Simon Phipps, OpenSolaris, Chief Open Source Officer, Sun Microsystems
> http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/

Nifty material at best, I'm afraid.  He's not the reason for OpenSolaris, he's 
just the middle manager assigned to it.  His name recognition is zero.

If you want a non-Linux GoH, try Marshall "Kirk" McKusick.  He's one of the 
founders of BSD, still a highly respected figure in that community, and he 
remains relevant as a published author who still writes BSD books.

Dunno if he blogs, though.

> Firefox developers:
> Ben Goodger: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/ben/
> Blake Ross: http://www.blakeross.com/
> Asa Dotsler: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/asa/

Of the three, Ben's probably the best known.  I'm also under the vague 
impression he lives outside the country.

> Louis Suarez-Potts, OpenOffice
> http://homepage.mac.com/luispo/blog/index.html
> 
> Miguel de Icaza, started GNOME, Mono, cofounded Ximian
> http://tirania.org/blog/

Very well known, but unfortunately he's widely regarded as completely insane.  
I honestly don't know how he is in person, but would be tempted to invoke the 
William Shatner rule regarding him anyway.  (Famous != good guest.)

> Nat Friedman, Novell VP of Linux Desktops, cofounded Ximian
> http://www.nat.org/2006/june/

He'd be cool.

> Naturally if any of these live overseas, they're unlikely to attend.
> 
> Discuss?
> 
> -Matt

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.