mrd: If you have a lot of people who want to present a lot of material, perhaps after the programme committee has selected the papers, you could organise a series of BoF sessions, or perhaps timeslots for 5-15 minute 'flash talks'. Perhaps that would be a good way to showcase good work that mightn't otherwise make it onto the programme.

(I'm all paid up and ready to go. I can hardly wait, because having seen LCA in past years, I know that next year's programme is going to be excellent. Definitely worth the cost of getting there.)

AUUG National Conference

I attended the AUUG National Conference in Sydney on Wednesday to present a paper [PDF] on the web track. Unfortunately for me, I got to be the poor chump whose talk got scheduled concurrently with the 'Who Owns UNIX' panel, and I was only able to catch the last ten minutes of it.

For those of you not keeping up with the whole SCO debate, Greg Lehey (AUUG President), Con Zymaris and MD of SCO Australia, Kieran O'Shaughnessy have been slugging it out in the media over SCO's tall stories regarding theft of SCO IP in the Linux kernel. The panel session took the debate face to face, and it's fair to say that O'Shaughnessy and SCO was totally outclassed.

Now Lehey himself kind-of scooped me in a big way, so you can follow the link to learn what happened from the horse's mouth. In a nutshell, O'Shaughnessy presented SCO's 'evidence', and then the panel and conference delegates proceeded to politely but relentlessly tear him apart piece by piece. It was fun to watch.