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I’m getting excited for the upcoming Utah Open Source Conference 2009, Thursday October 8 through Saturday October 10. It’s hard to believe another year has gone by already. There are a ton of great speakers and events that I anxiously await. Not to make light of the conference presentations, some of my favorite parts are the social events, like the Boardgame Bash at the end of the conference. For a bunch of geeks, we seem to be a pretty fun crowd, I think. I also love that the UTOS folks take family seriously, and have family events on Saturday that are fun for the wife, kids, and other non-geek family members. There’s a healthy focus on bringing new people, and less technical people, into the Open Source fold, which I think is great.

This year, as soon as submission of abstracts opened, I tossed in a presentation for the first idea that came to mind, which happened to be about one of my favorite open source platforms, FreeBSD. Lo and behold, after the voting and committee meetings were over, I was one left standing, so now I’ll be presenting “Why FreeBSD is the Best Linux Distro*” at the conference. Of course, when I decided to run the risk of making a joke in a room full of highly technical purists, I knew I better use the asterisk and let them in on the joke: “* Yes, FreeBSD isn’t really a Linux Distro. It’s a different Operating System that has emulation for and binary compatibility with Linux and can run almost all the same programs.” Even though it isn’t really a Linux distribution, for me it serves the same purpose and I think it does a better job than the various Linux distributions I’ve experienced.

Anyway, early-bird discounts end on Saturday the 19th, and there are some 50% off coupon codes drifting around if you’re interested. There are codes you can get from speakers, any local Linux User Group (LUG), or other groups like UPHPU.