That alone should provide an indication of the extent to which Australians have been, and are, involved in the free and open source software community. From Monday, Sydney's University of New South Wales will play host to the eighth Australian Linux Conference better known as linux.conf.au.

Melbourne was the pioneer, hosting what was then called the Conference of Australian Linux Users in July 1999. The three-day affair at the Monash University attracted a big crowd, with Linux International's Jon "Maddog" Hall also putting in an appearance. Hall is one of the best known and most vociferous FOSS advocates.

From the start, the emphasis has been on the technical side of things and even the Melbourne conference drew luminaries like Andrew Tridgell of Samba and rsync fame. There was one speaker from the BSD world, with Darren Reed, who has developed ipfilter, giving a talk.

Over the past seven years - barring 2000 when it wasn't held - the conference has expanded considerably and now runs over a week. The conference has moved from city to city, even going across the Tasman last year to Dunedin. In 2003, the creator of Linux, Linus Benedict Torvalds, put in a surprise appearance atthe Perth event. Sydney last played host in 2001 and apart from Hobart, every major Australian city has now had a turn to host the event. Next year it is expected that Melbourne will be the host

The biggest noise at the conference this year will undoubtedly be Theodore Ts'o, a systems programmer at IBM and probably the first Linux kernel hacker from North America, having been at the task since 1991. Ted holds a number of administrative posts on bodies connected with FOSS; he is also a member of the standards-setting Internet Engineering Task Force.

A number of mini conferences will be held on the first two days and it is noticeable that there is none which covers KDE, the best known desktop environment in the Linux (and indeed Unix) world. Debian, Gnome, MySQL and PostgreSQL feature on this roster.

 The talks on the One Laptop Per Child project will be of interest if only because there has been some controversy over the choice of wireless chipset chosen for the project. Theo de Raadt, the founder of the OpenBSD project, has given voice to concerns, pointing out that "I think it is seriously hypocritical for OLPC to be heading towards Linux BIOS (goal: to not run vendor code) while at the same time they go signing NDA’s with Marvell for the wireless driver (goal:to run vendor code), and then won’t participate with other groups who want Marvell to release documentation for their wireless chips."

One member of the media will be presenting at the conference - Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier, editorial director of Linux.com, will be speaking on the "best ways for projects to promote themselves and ensure success."

This seems an opportune time to mention that the conference has a media sponsor this year, the second time this has happened. To my mind this is an obnoxiouspractice but maybe the organisers know better. It normally means that a media outlet pays for the "privilege" of getting faster and probably easier access towhatever schlock the organisers want to dish out. What deal the organisers have cut with Builder AU, the media sponsor, is not known.

This year, there is also a visible change in the way the organisers are catering to the media - in past years it was well nigh impossible to get a commitment from those behind the show to organise press interviews. This year, the organisers appear to be taking a more educated approach. The linux.conf.au website says: "We'll have a press conference during linux.conf.au and we can also set up personal interviews for you. Just let us know who you are interested in chatting to and we'll make sure it happens."

A prominent name missing among the major sponsors is Novell. Probably the company did not think it a good idea to put its name up in neon lights at this time, when it is not exactly popular in the community, along with the likes of IBM and HP; Novell has opted to be a "supporter", the lowest category of sponsor, along with MySQL AB. Sun Microsystems is missing altogether but Google, Ubuntu and Intel are there.

Let the talking begin.