The curtains are up on GUADEC 2014, and the first keynote was delivered by Jim Hall. Jim is the Director of Information Technology at Morris, University of Minnesota, and he presented his work on usability in GNOME. We took some time to talk to Jim about his keynote and about his research on GNOME.

Aric Gardner is a Linux Foundation SysAdmin who works on the OpenDaylight collaborative project. Here he tells the story of how became a sysadmin, shares his specialty in scripting and automation, and describes a typical day at work, among other things.

GUADEC 2014 is almost upon us, and we are talking to the three keynote speakers who are lined up for this year’s conference. Nathan Wills – LWN editor, typeface designer and author – is one of these keynote speakers. His talk, titled Should We Teach The Robot To Kill, addresses issues relating to Free Software and the automative industry. We caught up with him to find out a bit more about this fascinating subject, as well as his views on Free Software conferences.

Karen Sandler is a veteran of the free and open source software world. Having completed an engineering degree, she has worked as a lawyer for the Software Freedom Law Center, was Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, and recently accepted a position as Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy. I interviewed Karen via email to ask her about her background and insight into various issues in the free and open source world.

Eric Searcy is the IT Infrastructure Manager at the Linux Foundation. Here he tells us how he got started as a sysadmin and at the Linux Foundation, describes his typical day at work, and shares his favorite sysadmin tools, among other things.

Linaro is growing fast so I am currently focused on management and development processes. Together with the technical leads and the project managers, my goal is to keep high levels of efficiency within the Group while growing, keeping the Free Software culture that has made Linaro so successful.

Clint Savage is a system administrator for the Linux Foundation's Collaborative Projects. Here he discusses the new technologies he's been digging into lately, his favorite part of the job, and fond memories of a weeklong hackfest with his coworkers.

I was working at McGill University InfoSec at the time, and was also active with Fedora Project -- which is how my name showed up on the list of candidates. The Linux Foundation was looking for a systems administrator with a strong background in IT security -- who would also be a good fit for a decentralized team of passionate open-source advocates. I'm extremely glad I was a good fit for the position, as I can't imagine receiving as much satisfaction from any other job.

“In the last five to six years I began working with 3D printers and CNC machines. I started to build stuff, such as furniture and gadgets, and my first Raspberry Pi project was the Pi Snap Box. It’s the size of a mini-PC and is a box you put on the wall with one button on it. If you press the button, it takes three photos. It posts the first photo to a Facebook account for whoever the box belongs to. So for example, if you hang it up in a hairdresser’s salon and get your hair done all nicely, people could then see the good results on the hairdresser’s Facebook page.

Spencer Hunley is an autistic professional, former Vice Chair of the Kansas City Mayor's Committee for People with Disabilities, and current board member of the Autism Society of the Heartland & ASAN's Kansas City chapter. In August, Spencer will be giving a talk, Universal Tux: Accessibility For Our Future Selves, at LinuxCon in Chicago. He also gave a talk, Maximizing Accessibility: Engaging People with Disabilities In The Linux Community, at LinuxCon North America 2013.

In this interview, Spencer provides an update on the state of accessibility in Linux and open source software.

Experience with Linux is an important thing – a track record of tinkering and involvement in the open source world. Working in drivers, embedded Linux, etc. At this point companies are desperate for Linux talent. The most important thing to show is you've gotten hands-on with bits of the kernel, whichever ones are interesting to you personally. Time spent as a site reliability engineer or working in a DevOps environment is particularly attractive to employers these days, as are well rounded sys admin skills. Even if you just run Linux as your primary operating system and know how to tinker with your machine, you’re ahead of many candidates.

Michael Halstead maintains all of the public facing infrastructure for the Yocto Project, a Linux Foundation collaborative project that provides the tools and methods for building custom embedded Linux distributions. In this Q&A he describes his typical day at work, the best part of his job, how he spends his free time, and more.

From new cloud platforms, to changes in virtualization and container technologies, to how data is stored and transmitted, every innovation in the data center has a Linux-based or open source component, says Imad Sousou vice president of the Software and Services Group and general manager of the Intel Open Source Technology Center at Intel.

“To a great degree... the speed with which solutions can be brought online is the result of Linux and open source in the data center,” said Sousou, who is also on the OpenStack Foundation board of directors. “The amount of collaboration around the future of the data center is very encouraging.”

Making money from open source. To many in the corporate world, that seems like a contradiction in terms. How are you supposed to make money from something that you give away? they ask. It can be done. A number of companies, large and small, have done quite well in the open source space over the years.

Just ask Patrick McFadin. He’s the chief evangelist for Apache Cassandra at DataStax, a company that’s embraced the open source way. He’s also interviewed leaders at a number of successful open source companies to gain insights into what makes a successful open source business.

"Open source gives us brand permission to enter a ton of categories," said Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst.

Jane Silber is the CEO of Canonical, a 650-employee software company best known for two things. Its Linux operating system, named Ubuntu, that competes with Windows and Macs, and its bold plan to take on Apple, Google, and Microsoft with soon-to-be released phones/tablets/internet TV devices.

On June 30, the Linux Foundation's Automotive Grade Linux (AGL) project released the first version of its open source AGL stack for in-vehicle infotainment (IVI). Based on Tizen IVI, AGL adds a stylish user interface and various applications written in HTML5 and JavaScript. The AGL stack, which is partially compatible with the somewhat similar, open source Linux GENIVI Foundation spec, supports multiple hardware architectures.

A Firefox OS evangelist and volunteer working as the platform's Early Feedback Community Release Manager, Kerensa will use his time on stage at this year's OSCON to wage a recruitment effort. Along with Alex Lakatos, Kerensa will present Getting Started Contributing to Firefox OS, an introduction to building applications for the operating system. Attendees will learn how Firefox OS embodies Mozilla's commitment to open web standards like HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

I've been doing some form of systems administration since my freshman year in college (1994) and I've been making my living as only a sys admin since 2000...

Katie Miller is a Developer Advocate at Red Hat for the open source Platform as a Service, OpenShift, and co-founder of the Lambda Ladies group for women in functional programming. She has a passion for language and linguistics, but also for the open source way.

I have a Red Hat sticker on my laptop that simply says: It's better to share.

In this interview, Katie shares with me how she moved from journalism to a job in technology. Also, how she got introduced to functional programming, the Haskell programming language, and how open source is part of her daily life.