This is just a small update from the Red Hat EMEA Partner Summit in Malta. As was to be expected, I don’t really have much time to write these update between the interesting sessions.
Yesterday, we started off with the keynotes. For me, as a from a technical and idealist perspective, the keynotes from Jim Whitehurst and Scott Crenshaw were of particular interest. Call me a hippie, but I think it’s totally awesome that this company can build a financially rock solid company on purely open source products without compromising any of the essential Free Software Freedoms (look at this Microsoft deal for instance, they got the very best deal possible for the free software community). That’s what I call a full commitment. I met a few people new to the open source business, and I see how these events go a long way towards winning the hearts and minds of people who are not as convinced of the free software model as we are.
So, after these keynotes I went for the technical tracks for the rest of the day. After the coffee break we started off with the RHEL roadmap update. After lunch we had a session on cloud computing, where using the Amazon Elastic Cloud was demonstrated to us from a user perspective. The user perspective was quite refreshing for me, as I’m implementing the infrastructure behind Stone-IT’s LinuxClouds project. After this session we had another virtualization session, this time on KVM (the linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine) and why it’s architecture is superior to Xen’s. I think it’s safe to conclude that from an engineering / implementation perspective, both are excellent products. For Red Hat, maintaining Xen is a tougher choice, because a lot of functionality in Xen has to be maintained both in the hypervisor and the privileged domain, so KVM is a logical choice from a long-term strategical perspective. Red Hat stressed again and again that customers and partners currently implementing Xen as their hypervisor have no reason to worry: it will be supported until at least March 2014.
After this technical talk, it was time for my colleague, Jan van der Torn, to present the work (ours and theirs) at the St. Antonius Hospital in the Netherlands, where we’re assisting them in migrating from proprietary software products to free software and open standards. I won’t go into too much detail here, but if you’re interested you should read this article.
After all this listening it was time for some liquid refreshments. 
I must say the Maltese wine is pretty good, and I had loads of fun talking to all these interesting and smart people walking around. It’s a very inspiring atmosphere.
That’s all for this update, I do have some pictures, but I forgot to bring my USB cable to the conference today, so I’ll be posting those later.
