The annual Ottawa Linux Symposium just concluded in Ottawa, Canada, and it was every bit as fantastic as I expected. Every year, in the middle of July, hundreds of the world’s most well known Linux community figures head for Ottawa to hang out, talk shop, and generally enjoy the various Linux conferences cunningly arranged to coincide with the fine weather. About OLS This year, the official conferences associated with the event included the Linux Kernel Summit (KS), the Desktop Developer’s Conference (DDC), the GCC summit, and the main Linux Symposium. All of these events take place within days of one another at the Congress Center (Centre des Congres), organized by a team of dedicated community members who have been in this game for quite some time. In fact, this year was the 8th Linux Symposium, and things have really come a long way since Andrew Hutton formed the first OLS back in 1999 out of a few carefully arranged speaker invitations to well known members of the community. The scale of the conference may have changed with time (this year, over 850 people attended), but the event is still true to its original goal of bringing Linux developers together.