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Every conference, at least the good ones, has a theme to tease out and lessons to learn. LinuxCon North America 2011 was one of the best, and having the good fortune to be in Vancouver, BC last week for LinuxCon, I learned quite a bit. Now, I'm not just talking about technical stuff. There were plenty of great technical sessions and case studies. For instance, I learned quite a bit about Oregon State University's Open Source Lab (OSUOSL) during Lance Albertson's talk Friday. But what I'm talking about are the larger lessons and themes that come out of a conference. When you get a bunch of people in an industry together, you often find some larger trends worth thinking about. LinuxCon was definitely no exception.

In a flurry of filing activity in the Oracle v. Google case this past week, a couple of rulings by the court stand out. First, Google has won the right 325 [PDF] to file a motion for summary judgment on the Oracle affirmative defense of "assignor estoppel." Second, Google has won the right 328 [PDF] to file a motion for summary judgment on the issue of infringement outside the U.S. under 35 U.S.C. § 271(f). This last one is really important for reasons we will explain.

In today’s data center, millions of instructions per second (MIPS) and gigabyte per second (GBPS) throughput are well and good, but being green (having a low power consumption) is becoming just as important. That’s why Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu Linux, is betting that in the long run, ARM processors will play an important role in tomorrow’s servers and datacenters.

Back in January, in a post "Does Android Have a Forked Future?" we explored the fact that Google seemed poised to explore several different paths with its Android mobile OS. Specifically, we noted that with Android 3.0 (Honeycomb), Google seemed to be aiming targeted features at tablet developers, while other versions of Android would be more appropriate for smartphones and other devices. Since then, many stories have appeared charging that Google is being less than open with Android, and it's generally accepted that Google won't necessarily release the newest version of Android to all hardware developers at once. With Google's Motorola Mobility acquisition, how likely is it that Google will pursue an even more closed Android strategy?

Wind River announced a new version of its Linux-ready, embedded device test automation software. Wind River Test Management 4.0 can now identify high-risk segments in production code, as well as focus testing solely on changes made between builds, among other new features, says the company.

Sales of the "discontinued" HP TouchPad have been brisk after its price was cut to as little as $99, and hackers are working overtime to port Ubuntu and Android to the WebOS-based tablet. Meanwhile, analysts speculate on who might acquire HP's WebOS operations, which include a 2,000-plus patent portfolio that one analyst says could recoup the cost of HP's Palm acquisition.

Computing environments may revolve around heavy usage of NFS infrastructure. Network areas are hosted and provided by storage file servers, with compute servers mounting the exported areas into their directory tree. Periodically, the mounts expire when not in use and are removed from the directory tree on local machines.

If Google were to make Android proprietary, with devices built exclusively by Motorola, it could earn $10.5 billion in profits by 2015, yet that still may not be worth it, says Piper Jaffray. Meanwhile, Google's Motorola acquisition should bolster Google TV, other analysts say.

LXer Feature: 21-Aug-2011

This week's installment of the LXer Weekly Roundup. Enjoy!

Earlier this year Apple introduced Thunderbolt ports on their new systems while more hardware vendors will be offering these next-generation high-speed connections on their systems going forward, particularly when the Ivy Bridge hardware is rolled out. Thunderbolt, which was developed under the Light Peak codename, can transfer data at 20 Gbit/s and offers much potential, but how's the Linux support?

It's official! OpenEMR has passed all ONC certification tests as a fully qualified emr that can be used to attest for incentive moneys. The official posting: http://onc-chpl.force.com/ehrcert/EHRProductDetail?id=a0X300... appeared on the website 2011/08/19. Congratulations to all involved! OpenEMR 4.1 should be ready for download in a few weeks. This accomplishment is an amazing feat for an open source project, requiring many, many hours of interpretation of standards, coding, bug fixes, testing, and not least of all many thousands of dollars in fundraising to certify a product which has no corporate ownership and no financial return on that investment. It is LAMP based software that is free to use and inexpensive to run; hardware requirements are minimal. If you haven't seen us in a while, please visit at "http://www.open-emr.org" and the supporting organization "http://www.oemr.org" for more information. Jack Cahn MD oemr.org Board of Directors

Since its release, the Eclipse Rich Client Platform (RCP) has suffered from a lack of support for automated builds with tests. The IDE provides tools for building and packaging RCP applications, but they are very different from the PDE/Build tools that perform these tasks in an automated fashion. Also, until recently, testing support for JUnit 4 was not present in the Eclipse TestFramework. While the situation has markedly improved in Eclipse 3.6, setting up an automated build with tests remains a time-consuming and difficult task.

The LinuxCon conference that ended Aug. 19 in Vancouver featured a 20th Anniversary Gala for Linux and plenty of discussions on a fast changing industry. Highlights included a call for a long-term Linux kernel, keynotes from Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurstand IBM Linux guru Irving Wladawsky-Berger, and fork-loving Linus Torvalds taking a mellow approach to the code rift with Android.

As most are already aware, LinuxCon North America 2011 is taking place this week in Vancouver, Canada. What makes this year's Linux Foundation conference special is that it's celebrating the 20th anniversary of the creation of the Linux kernel by Linus Torvalds. Here are some photos from the special event.

While Silicon Valley is still bubbling like it's 1999, tech investor Mark Suster thinks the flailing job market and imploding stock market is a warning to entrepreneurs: raise what money you can as fast as you can, because life is about to get much harder, even for web companies. But at least one company must be looking at the impending doom and smiling ear to ear: Red Hat. Quarter after quarter, through good times and bad, Red Hat delivers excellent performance.

Twenty years ago, the tech landscape looked very different from that of today. Cell phones were a luxury of the rich, and the devices themselves were pretty dumb. Microsoft ruled the desktop landscape barely challenged by competition from IBM and Apple. The Internet was just a gleam in Al Gore's eye (kidding!). And a young University of Helsinki student named Linus Torvalds started work on an operating system that came to be known as Linux.

New details have emerged about the 28nm followups to AMD's successful E-Series and C-Series processors. The & Deccan& platform will reportedly include & Wichita& and & Krishna& chips that include quad cores, support for 1666MHz DDR3 memory, and a & secure asset management unit& that offloads DVD and Blu-ray decryption from the x86 cores....

Cloud might be all the rage, but file and print server technology is still critical -- just ask Samba. There are many different constituents on the Linux Planet. The cloud, mobile and even file and print sharing are all key targets for Linux. This past week, there was news on all fronts; in the coming week, there is likely to be even more.

Google announced plans to acquire Motorola Mobility this morning for $12.5 billion in cash. One of Google's biggest motivations for the purchase is to bolster its patent profile, which has been under relentless attack by companies including Microsoft and Apple. With the purchase, Google will gain control of more than 17,000 mobile-related patents worldwide, with 7,000 more Motorola patent applications in the pipeline.

"Those tablets and smartphones and web-based apps and ChromeOS laptops with their Google DNA and Linux underpinnings are all direct threats to the Windows OS, so I wouldn't say this is a downgrading of Linux, but an acceptance that Google is going to be the primary way that most people will adopt Linux without realizing it," said Slashdot blogger Barbara Hudson.