T-shirt design contest celebrates 30 years of Linux

T-shirt design contest celebrates 30 years of Linux

Jul 9, 2021 — by Eric Brown

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The Linux Foundation has launched a T-shirt design contest to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Linux. The LF also announced an Open 3D Foundation for creating an Open 3D Engine plus an Open Voice Network for open, AI-enabled voice assistance.

Linux is turning 30 on Aug. 25 and the Linux Foundation is celebrating with a T-shirt contest (no, not that kind). Designers are invited to submit a design for a T-shirt by Aug. 6 that will commemorate the event. The winning design will be used for the official T-shirt at the Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference, which returns to a live format this year. The LF also announced two new initiatives designed to advance open source 3D gaming and open voice AI technology (see farther below).

The winning T-shirt designer will win a free trip covering airfare, four nights in a hotel, and a conference ticket for this year’s OSS+ELC event in Seattle or one of next year’s (North America, Japan or Europe) 2022 events (North America, Japan or Europe). The final three designs will be posted on social media for a crowdsourced vote, and the winning design will be announced on Aug. 25.

This year’s Open Source Summit + Embedded Linux Conference, which recently opened for registration, will take place Sep. 27 to Oct. 1 in Seattle. Program listings have yet to be posted.

No thematic guidelines were suggested for the T-shirt designs. However, the 11-inch wide by 13-inch tall design must be in vector formats with outlined fonts and a maximum of 8x Pantone colors.

Linus Torvalds announced his unnamed, MINIX-derived, open source OS kernel on Aug. 25. The 21-year old Linus wanted to call it Freax, but when his friend Ari Lemmke uploaded the files to the FTP server, he changed the name to Linux, perhaps deciding that nobody wanted to be freaked out by their operating system.

Linux had many enhancements over the UNIX-based MINIX, including terminal emulation and file management. Yet, the most significant addition may have been Torvalds’ choice of an open source licensing scheme called GPL (GNU General Public License) developed by Richard Stallman.

The Linux Foundation started off its 30th anniversary celebration by releasing a slide show of Linux users and developers revealing how Linux has changed their lives.

Open 3D Foundation

On July 6, the Linux Foundation announced the intention to form a group that will address one of the last holdouts against the advancement of Linux and open source: 3D gaming. Specifically, the LF announced the intention of creating an Open 3D Foundation that will “accelerate developer collaboration on 3D game and simulation technology.” The organization will “support open source projects that advance capabilities related to 3D graphics, rendering, authoring, and development.”

The first Open 3D Foundation project has been kickstarted by Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), which has contributed an updated version of its Amazon Lumberyard game engine as the Open 3D Engine (O3DE). The O3DE engine, which is already available on GitHub, is available under a permissive Apache 2.0 license.

Open 3D Engine Editor screen
(click image to enlarge)

The Open 3D Engine provides a new multi-threaded photorealistic renderer, an extensible 3D content editor, a data-driven character animation system, and a node-based visual scripting tool. The engine is designed for more than gaming, with listed applications including simulation, 3D rendering, content authoring tools, animation, physics systems, and asset processing.

Founding members of the Open 3D Foundation include AccelByte, Adobe, Apocalypse Studios, Audiokinetic, AWS, Backtrace.io, Carbonated, Futurewei, GAMEPOCH, Genvid Technologies, Hadean, HERE Technologies, Huawei, Intel, International Game Developers Association, KitBash3D, Kythera AI, Niantic, Open Robotics, PopcornFX, Red Hat, Rochester Institute of Technology, SideFX, Tafi, TLM Partners and Wargaming.

For more information, you can check out this O3DE panel on July 22. An O3DECon event is scheduled for Oct. 12.

Open Voice Network

On June 22, the Linux Foundation announced the formation of the Open Voice Network. The association will work to advance open standards that support the adoption of AI-enabled voice assistance systems.

One of the goals of the Open Voice Network is to help integrate voice assistance into “multiple business processes and brand environments from the call center to the branch office and the store,” says the LF. The initiative also aims to “protect the consumer and the proprietary data that flows through voice.”

The founding membership is an odd mix of retail and tech giants: Target, Schwarz Gruppe, Wegmans Food Markets, Microsoft, Veritone, and Deutsche Telekom. (Amazon appears to be sitting this one out.)

Further information

More information on the T-Shirt Design Contest for the 30th Anniversary of Linux may be found in the Linux Foundation’s announcement. The deadline is Aug. 6.