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It is not an exaggeration to say that Linux is at the center of the open source movement. So it is not unusual (in fact, quite common) for many open source events to bear the Linux name, when in the majority of the cases they embrace the wider ecosystem that encompasses an ample variety of open source software projects.

One such event is the Linux Picnic, also known as Picn*x, an outdoors community gathering held every year to celebrate all the accomplishments of Open Source Software since the release of the first Linux kernel in August 1991. Picn*x 19 is scheduled to be held in the San Francisco South Bay Area on Saturday August 21st, at the Sunnyvale Baylands Park, and you can expect Haiku to be there.

The Australian Haiku Users and Developers Conference, Haiku Down Under, is scheduled to be held this coming Sunday August 22nd, from 9:00 in the morning (GMT +10; find your time zone here). This event, also known as HDU, was started in 2008 as a virtual conference by long time community member contributor and Phil "Sikosis" Greenway (see brief history), and is usually held on the same week that Haiku celebrates its birthday. The focus of the event is to raise awareness about Haiku, and generate interest and discussions around the project and the OS, in an attempt to build a community in that part of the world.

The HDU program includes sessions covering topics such as the state of Haiku, an introduction to Project Rhino (http://rhino.haikupc.com) (a native backup application), and a hands on demo of Haiku. Registration and chat will take place online via the Haiku Australia IRC channel (#haiku-au) on Freenode. Edit 8/19: You will also be able follow the life video feed of the event on USTREAM.

Most Haiku fans must already know about Learning to Program with Haiku, a book written by Haiku developer Jon Yoder (aka DarkWyrm) and recently published by the author through Lulu.com. This book, the first one about the Haiku operating system to hit the shelves, introduces aspiring developers to the wonders of application programming in Haiku using C++, and does so in an easy to follow, step by step format.

Jon and a group of Haiku community members from Japan have reached a basic agreement to to produce and publish a Japanese version of this book to target (you guessed) Japanese readers. To that end, a translation and editing team has been formed that will work to make this project come to fruition. The team is comprised by long time BeOS and Haiku developer from Japan known as SHINTA, the developer of the Canna Japanese input method used in Haiku Takashi Murai, the current Japanese Translation Manager for Haiku Satoshi Eguchi, and former Haiku marketing guru Jorge G. Mare (ehem, that's me).

Haiku was featured this past Wednesday on the FLOSS Weekly 120 video podcast hosted by Perl Monger co-founder Randal Schwartz, with KDE developer Aaron Seigo as co-host. Interviewed from Haiku were Ryan Leavengood, the developer who initiated the Webkit port which would end up being used in the recently released native browser for Haiku called WebPositive, and Niels Sascha Reedijk, a well rounded contributor who has participated in various areas of the project, and who currently is the documentation team lead and a sysadmin.