10 Great Quotes from LinuxCon and CloudOpen Europe Keynote Videos 2014

There were many inspiring talks alongside the great technical content at LinuxCon, CloudOpen and Embedded Linux Conference Euorpe in Dusseldorf last month. To give you a taste, I’ve chosen a quote from each keynote that I think will get your blood pumping or pique your interest. You can watch each keynote in full, below, or on the Linux Foundation’s YouTube channel.

1. State of Linux – Jim Zemlin, The Linux Foundation

“Drones are only at the very beginning of what I think is going to be an incredible industry with applications we haven’t thought of. That’s what makes it such a great open source project. The more people who get involved the more we’re going to see unexpected innovation in platforms that are powering a new and vibrant industry.” – Zemlin on the news that Dronecode is a new Linux Foundation collaborative project.

2. How Open Source is Improving Health of the Poor – Paul Biondich, OpenMRS

“Diseases like HIV and TB are not really treatment problems, we have effective medications for them. They’re really system challenges around information management and infrastructure, and you’re seeing a lot of that happen with ebola as well.”

3. Building Blocks of AWS – Chris Schlaeger, Amazon Web Services

“We’ve seen quite an impressive growth of adding features and services to AWS. If you look at the number of new features and services we’ve launched each year you’ll see a slight acceleration. We’re getting more and more each year and that trend continues steadily. How is that possible? … Open source technology allowed us to do this.”

4. Giving Private Clouds Public Capabilities – Frank Karlitschek, OwnCloud

“In the second generation of cloud software you don’t have one single cloud instance. There are lots of individual ones… Everybody can have their own local cloud services; it’s on premise. It’s very secure because you control the policies and software. It’s flexible – you can integrate it with other software and services. It’s fast because it’s all local, and you don’t have to transfer stuff all over the planet to share it with the guy next door.”

5. The Service Enabling Wireless Network – Anthony C. K. Soong, Huawei

“We have exponential growth in the data that’s being carried through the mobile network… but what’s also interesting is the mobile revenue is almost flat. That means I have to start building infrastructure that is exponentially cheaper in the cost per bit and that’s not a good thing. But eventually I came to the conclusion if you’re only about reducing costs, that’s the minute your industry is dead. We can’t just reduce costs. We need to bend that top line up. Our great hope is that all of you (in the open source community) will be able to help us bend that curve up.”

6. Building Exponential Communities – Jono Bacon, XPRIZE

“Open source is where society innovates; where we explore and create things that haven’t yet hit the mainstream.”

7. Communities, Enterprises and All the Rest – Olaf Kirch, SUSE

From the open source perspective, enterprise IT “is just doing a little bit of code on top of my operating system. And if you talk to enterprise people they’ll paint a picture of the open source community as not very easy to have a conversation with… They’re just a little bit of code under my application and they don’t really understand my business needs. So it looks like we’re all set for a very good collaboration, right?”

8. Qubes OS – Joanna Rutkowska, Invisible Things Lab

“We really need secure client systems (desktop, laptop and mobile devices). If our client system is compromised, then really there is no security. However secure your cloud, your crypto, your network protocol might be, if your client system is compromised, it’s game over.”

9. Linux Kernel Developer Panel

“I don’t want to ever be in a conversation where I’m tearing down or abusing another developer who is working here. If that happens on any of the mailing lists I’m going to, I’m going to call you on it, and I hope that when I screw up and start to get emotional and cross the line, that you’ll do the same for me.” – Grant Likely, Linaro.

10. Linux: Where Are We Going

“Find something that you’re passionate about and just do it.” – Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux.