Dan Kohn, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, has died

Last week Dan Kohn, the former executive director at Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), died quite to early as a result of colon cancer. 

We thank him for his long-term engagement for open source, for boundless collaboration and the Public Health Initiative of the Linux Foundation and his former dedication in several organizations and foundations. 

After the KubeCon and CloudNativeCon in Shanghai the cloud report had the opportunity to interview Dan, especially in context of the bad or hardly existing relationship between China and the US, it was an important step to run the KubeCon and CloudNativeCon in Shanghai with Dan as executive director of the CNCF. With that the CNCF states impressively for the openness and the freedom from prejudice of the open source foundations: 

How was the conference for CNFC and you personally? 

I am thrilled, it was a great conference. It was a big challenging process to host it in China, but it went all very well in the end. I am optimistic that the market is growing here. For western companies it was also an important step to come here to Shanghai, especially if they want to operate in China. It was important to CNCF to have a mix with Chinese and Western talks to get China´s companies involved to. 

The conference went so well, that we decided to move it to another conference center next time, so that we can host up to 3.000 participants then. 

One of the main differences is, that the main audience here was from Asia. We had more intro sessions due to the fact, that the audience in China is more new to KubeCon than in other countries we held the conference before. The audience in general differs: It is more conservative, and the language use had to use less slang, for example. 

Overall, I was surprised by the adoptions and different usage of Kubernetes in the Chinese markets. There is a lot going on here! 

How and where will the conference and Kubernetes in general be in 10 years? How will the community change? 

All technologies have a lifecycle and reach a plateau after a certain time. At some day, we might go down again, but at the moment, the community and Kubernetes is growing very fast. I hope, that there is some growth left and a long decline ahead, when we reach the plateau. 

There will evolve a greater open source involvement from Chinese users, I think. A lot of enterprises and traditional companies are adopting Kubernetes right now. There will emerge more different approaches, more e-learning and new technologies, too. 

After attending KubeCon in Shanghai I am even more certain: Conferences are a good way for personal and working development also: Growing in studying the new technologies, gaining knowledge and increasing the personal knowledge will help attendees to develop new learning opportunities for their companies as well as for themselves.