It's obvious that moving to Free Software from proprietary software reduces cost and improves ROI. Using Free Software to deploy that proprietary software and keep the same desktop experience also reduces annual cost. See examples of how using GNU/Linux to deploy Microsoft Windows in a multi-campus K12 environment saved money every year. Not only did it reduce desktop software costs, but it reduced server licensing costs. The students, teachers and staff get to keep using the same software and don't have a visible difference on their desktops. They do get better stability, backups, data security and flexibility. Using GNU/Linux as the deployment infrastructure also improves security and reduces firefighting for IT. When also moving to Free Software applications the cost savings and flexibility increase. The presentation includes tips on how to get users to request Free Software rather than forcing them to move over.

Ever wondered what would happen if you could rethink a decade worth of design changes? Drizzle is a fork of the MySQL server targeted at web development and cloud computing. We are looking at how to create database for modern multi-core, large memory databases that fit inside of an overall application framework.

Cloud infrastructures have provided a great deal of power and versatility, but come at a cost of management overhead. In many cases, a node in a cloud infrastructure has no guarantee of being there at any given moment, has an indeterminable spin up time, and has no way of determining apriori where it will be. These make it hard to coordinate work across the nodes. The typical approach for these setups is to provide an HTTP based registrar. While that works in many cases, the lack of bidirectional communication introduces a bit of ambiguity. What is happening between checkins? Does a node need to unregister itself? What happens when a node goes down? Botnet shepherds have long been dealing with similar problems as cloud shepherds are dealing with now. A botnet node can go down at any time, there is no way to determine when a node will come into the botnet, and botnet nodes come from all over the place. Currently, the primary mechanism that botnet shepherds use to control their networks is over IRC channels. While the primary appeals have been the low barrier to entry, the always on messaging infrastructure, and the inability to lock down the channel, this approach provides an efficient way to coordinate activity in an environment with the above issue with little overhead. Given the similarities between managing a botnet herd and managing a cloud herd, why not use the same management mechanisms that botnets use for more above the board purposes? How well do instant messaging infrastructures work for cloud infrastructures? In this talk, we examine how we can use the botnet herding techniques to manage a large host of servers in a couple of scenarios. We will look at using XMPP as a transport mechanism for a traditional hosting environment as well as a cloud environment.

Educators and Developers worldwide are teaming up to bring Sugar's OS Software to students everywhere. The programs they create, called Activities, can be run on OLPC's XO, and, via usb downloads, on PCs, including Macs with Intel processors. The list of Activities has grown from a few dozen when the XO first made its public debut in 2007 to over 300 by the end of December 2009. In addition, using other web based resources via Sugar has been made easier. As the collection of Activities has grown, more programs of interest to older students, and even adults, have been added. Participants will learn about the latest and greatest Sugar Activities and the simple processes for getting them for their students. We will look at Sugar on a Stick, buying XO laptops for their school, and the Contributors Program which supplies a small number of free XO computers to educators and developers who want to contribute programs or other content to the greater OLPC/Sugar Labs community.