Secret Society Alert: The Vyatta Open Arcade Classic

Well, it has been quite a while since we had a good, old-fashioned Vyatta Secret Society party. In the early days of the company, we'd have a get-together every couple months of something we called the Vyatta Secret Society. We were still in stealth mode at the time and didn't even have a basic web site. We'd meet with some early friends of the company to discuss what we were up to and seek input. After Vyatta launched the original beta version of the Vyatta system in February 2005, we had to decide whether to continue having "Secret" Society meetings. We thought it was a good idea to continue, even if the Society was no longer very secret, and there have been several good events since that time.

Well, get ready again. This time we're planning the Vyatta Open Arcade Classic, a video game competition for open-source "charities." You can find all the details on the Vyatta web site. You might note that LinuxWorld and the NGDC Conference are taking place in San Francisco that same week. The event is located very close to Moscone center. If you're planning on attending either show or conference and you like classic video game, open source, or want to meet some open-source luminaries, please drop by.

The thrust of the event is playing classic arcade style stand-up video games for open source project charities. We have five classic video games:

• Asteroids
• Defender
• Centipede
• PacMan
• Donkey Kong

We have also selected five open-source "luminaries" to work with us. Each luminary has selected an open source project as a "charity:"

Luminary	Project Charity
Jeremy Allison, Samba project	Free Software Foundation
Larry Augustin, Founder of VA Linux	Samba
Simon Crosby, CTO of XenSource	Linux Foundation
Mike Schroepfer, VP of engineering, Mozilla	SQLite
Jacob Taylor, CTO of SugarCRM	extjs

Basically, the drinks and appetizers at the event are free, but you'll have to pay to play the original stand-up versions of Asteroids, Donkey Kong, Defender, Pac Man, or Centipede. Vyatta will be donating $1000 to each of the five charities. Additionally, we'll donate an equal split of all the proceeds from the game players and we'll make the donation in the name of each of the high-score winners for each of the games.

In short, this is going to be a very fun event with a great opportunity to mix and mingle with some top-notch open-source people.

You might notice that Larry is playing for the Samba folks, and Jeremy Allison, from the Samba project, is playing for the Free Software Foundation. I originally asked Larry what his project charity would be and he said "Samba" and directed me to Jeremy to get the details worked out. Jeremy took one look at the event and said he wanted to play, too, but for the Free Software Foundation. Go figure.