LinuxCon to feature Red Hat, WebOS

Whitehurst is an obvious choice for a keynote, as Red Hat is probably the biggest enterprise IT vendor to bet its future on Linux and open source. McKinney of HP will detail his company's strategy with WebOS, a Linux-based mobile operating system running on smartphones, tablets and like as not even Windows PCs.

The changing enterprise Linux landscape

Mickos "will discuss the changing enterprise Linux landscape, exactly as it relates to cloud computing." During Mickos' Eucalyptus company offers an open source platform for building private clouds, his former company, MySQL, is now owned by Oracle.

Keynote speakers as well include Clay Shirky, an author of books about the effect of the Internet on society, and Mark Charlebois, director of open source strategy at Qualcomm Research Center. Charlebois will discuss Linux's role in mobile technology research.

Open source version of the Unix operating system

Torvalds started creating Linux in 1991 to provide an open source version of the Unix operating system. From its tiny beginnings, Linux has soared to become a major player in enterprise data centers, supercomputing, mobile devices and embedded systems.