Greetings from Boston, where for the next three days I'll be covering the fourth annual Red Hat Summit -- three days of breakout sessions, vendor demonstrations, and partner pride for all things Red Hat.

I've got plenty of good reasons to be here, not least of which are slated discussions about open source licensing -- in fact, there's a whole conference track specifically labeled "Open Source," which I'll be drinking in. But that's not the only place I'll be; I've got some one-on-one time set up with a couple of folks, and also plan to check out some of the more heavily technical sessions as adjuncts to my existing work. Case in point: the virtualization discussions, which will have a lot for me to take home vis-a-vis a piece I'm currently writing about VM solutions.

One of this year's conference tracks that seems to be a strong theme for Linux as a whole is "Beyond The Operating System." Linux is a starting point, not just an endpoint, and once you pick Linux (assuming you do) there's a whole host of other choices that follow from that -- what practices you adopt, what apps you run on top of it, what kind of ground-up modifications you might make. Now that Linux is no longer the little kernel that could, it's time to act like it -- and Red Hat has been walking the walk for a good long time now. Let's see what they have in store.