Some conferences feel like going home because you see lots of people you know but have not seen for a long time. The Red Hat Summit [1], held in Boston, Massachusetts, in June felt like this because a lot of the people I worked with at Digital Equipment Corporation's Unix group now work for Red Hat Software, including Brian Stevens, Red Hat's Chief Technology Officer.

Keynotes

Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO of Red Hat, kicked off the event and talked about a patent settlement that he said is "truly consistent with GPL, protecting all upstream and downstream developers." In addition, he spoke about a Red Hat initiative to create "Liberation fonts," a set of free and open fonts to allow for truly open documents, that would render the same as their non-free counterparts because the fonts could be digitally equivalent. He also touched on the economics of free software, pointing out that if we could "capture" the software written in-house and make it available to other programmers, we could obtain the advantages of software re-use.

John Halamka, CIO of Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center talked about open record formats and standards so that medical communities can share patients' records in a safe and secure manner. He also advocated e-prescribing, although only 13 percent of Massachusetts prescriptions are sent electronically. As a diabetic who travels a lot, I can vouch for the need for prescriptions that can be transferred easily between pharmacies.

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