Flourish: Chicago's Linux Event Is This Weekend

Flourish, one of the few Linux conferences held in the Chicagoland area each year, is happening this weekend. To much sadness, Flourish 2014 isn't as exciting as past years.

Flourish is the Linux conference organized each year by the Linux student group at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Flourish is now into its eighth year. The event this year is just taking place today, on Saturday, 5 April.

The conference this year is not really as exciting as previous years for this rare Chicago Linux event... In some of the past years it's happened for two (or possibly even three days, if counting the first Friday afternoon and going through Sunday), in past years there's been prominent speakers like Ryan Gordon talking about Linux gaming (in fact, he spoke multiple years at Flourish), and there's been parties and other interesting items about this conference.

This year it's happening just on Saturday and I have a hard time finding any of the talks interesting. The Flourish 2014 schedule has come together a bit more in recent days but overall there's at most three sessions simultaneously throughout the day, the talks are mostly about general open-source software or Bitcoin (in fact, Bitcoin seems to be the most popular topic this year), and various JavaScript / HTML5 talks.

The Flourish conference is free to attend and while I applaud the students for organizing this open-source / Linux event, there will not be any coverage of the event on Phoronix this year as I find it hard to justify going downtown for this one-day event that appears to be only some rather light talks this year. Hopefully next year will be better. For those Chicagoland area readers free today and interested in the topics mentioned, you can learn more about Flourish via their website.

At least this year, come the end of August, LinuxCon North America is being hosted in Chicago by the Linux Foundation. LinuxCon NA 2014 is happening 20 to 22 August at the Sheraton hotel. We're excited and the LinuxCon events are usually great and worth attending.