The Linux Foundation (LF), the nonprofit organization dedicated to accelerating the growth of Linux, today announced the formation of the LF Community Developer Travel Fund. This project stems from the recent formation of The Linux Foundation and its commitment to driving technical collaboration and support for the open source development community. The new initiative will provide funding to community developers to attend technical conferences, such as the upcoming Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit, where meaningful technical collaboration and development takes place. Community developers can apply at http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Travelfund.
It is vitally important for community developers to attend technical conferences to enable face-to-face collaboration. While the open source community was built from online participation, there is still no substitute for face-to-face meetings, especially when planning or driving consensus. In fact, many of the important technical breakthroughs in open source history occurred during these conferences. Many open source developers, however, do not have access to funds to pay for travel to attend these conferences. The Linux Foundation has created the Community Developer Travel Fund for these developers to accelerate technical problem solving and collaboration in the open source community.
Sponsorships are open to elite community developers with a proven track record of open source development achievement and who don't otherwise have access to funding for attending technical events. During the application process, applicants will need to point to their development achievements in key upstream Linux projects. Conferences covered by this fund include the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summits held three times a year, the LF's Japan Symposia, the Kernel Summit, Ottawa Linux Symposium, Linux.conf.au, desktop conferences such as GUADEC and aKademy, and other technical conferences where true collaboration takes place. The Travel Fund does not offer sponsorships to trade shows or non-technical conferences.
The first Travel Fund recipients are Ed Trager, maintainer for Unifont.org, which provides information about Unicode fonts, Unicode-enabled software, internationalization, and Unicode usability issues on free/libre/open source (FLOSS) operating systems, and Jeff Waugh, a founding member of Canonical and a key GNOME community developer. Trager will travel to and attend the Text Layout Summit at aKademy with his LF grant. Waugh's grant will be applied to his expenses for attending the Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit June 13 - 15, 2007.
"This fund is for rock stars of the open source world," said Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation. "This is not for someone who lurks on a mailing list. Getting a grant from this fund will be an honor reserved for those developers contributing the most to Linux and who have the greatest need for travel funds. The Linux Foundation wants to directly support these important developers. We think the Travel Fund is a good start to that support."
The LF staff will review applications for the fund and make determinations with feedback from the Technical Advisory Board, technical workgroups and others as needed. Sponsorship awardees will also receive a t-shirt from the LF commemorating the grant.
To apply for a sponsorship please visit http://www.linux-foundation.org/en/Travelfund. The Linux Foundation urges potential applicants to read the criteria closely before submitting an application. Only elite open source developers attending technical conferences will be eligible for a sponsorship.