John "Maddog" Hall will consider parallels between open source software and music, addressing the risk that patents "kill off ideas instead of promoting them" at this year's Australasian Linux conference, to be held in Dunedin this week.

"Odd things about business in the large corporate world will (hopefully) be explained," he says, including "companies who really want to do the right thing, but cannot.

"The talk will, of course, partly be tongue-in-cheek, partly be around my collection of automated musical instruments, and partly have a real message," he says.

Talking about the latest version of the Linux kernel, David Miller will pay particular attention to the TCP stack and innovations such as TCP Segmentation Offload.

Born and raised in South Africa, Mark Shuttleworth's topic of his keynote address will be "improving collaboration between open source projects."

Chris Cormack will address the structure and successes of the open-source library administration system.

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