The July 2007 meeting of the Triangle Linux Users Group (Sponsored by Hosted Solutions) will be held at 7pm, July 12, at Red Hat on the Centennial Campus of North Carolina State University (directions) . Our speaker will be Ken Coar, Vice President of the Apache Software Foundation on the topic of "Communication in Distributed Open Source Development".

Dealing with people from afar is not a new issue, but the explosive growth of open software involvement has brought some of its aspects into high, and sometimes critical, relief. People are having to learn to perform common tasks in new ways, and frequently their only teachers are themselves.

Ken Coar is a member and Vice President of the Apache Software Foundation, a director and VP of the Open Software Initiative, and a Senior Software Engineer with IBM. He has over two decades of experience with network software and applications, system administration, system programming, process analysis, technical support, and computer security. Ken knows more than a dozen programming languages, but mostly writes in Perl, PHP, and C. He has worked with the World-Wide Web since 1992, been involved with Apache since 1996, has been a member of the Association for Computing Machinery, and is one of the authors of the CGI 1.1 RFC (RFC 3875). He is the author of 'Apache Server for Dummies' and co-author of 'Apache Server Unleashed' and 'Apache Cookbook'. He somewhat spastically maintains a Web log, 'The Rodent's Burrow', at http://Ken.Coar.Org/burrow/ .

Ken currently lives in North Carolina, USA, with a variable number of cats, several computers, many many books and films, strange chemical experiments, and has varieties of furry woodland and feathered creatures frolicking at his (second-story) door. He is deliriously happily married, and his significantly better half, who has blessed his existence for more than two decades, is to blame for it. She is also responsible for most of Ken's successes, and certainly for what remains of his sanity.