Part of the excitement of attending a major conference is listening to industry leaders share the goings-on and goings-forward of the biggest names in the game. If you've been waiting to hear who will be on the dais for LinuxCon, listen up.

It may just be May, but LinuxCon is fast approaching, and information about the event — which will be held in Boston from August 10th - 12th — is slowly trickling out. This week's trickle concerns the conference schedule, which despite registration being in full swing, has been all but unknown.

On Wednesday, the Foundation announced who will be headlining the annual event. A perennial favorite, The Linux Kernel Roundtable, is at the top of the list, with panelists including:

• Ted Ts’o, Google fellow and the first North American kernel developer.
• James Bottomley, Novell distinguished engineer and Linux Kernel maintainer of the SCSI subsystem, the Linux Voyager port, and the 53c700 driver.
• Chris Mason, director of Linux kernel engineering at Oracle and creator of the btrfs file system.
• Jon Corbet, Linux kernel developer and Editor of Linux Weekly News (LWN).
• Dave Jones, Fedora kernel maintainer.

Attendees will also hear from:

• Stormy Peters (Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation): Peters will explore how data is being stored and accessed in the cloud and what that means for Linux and open source.
• Jeffrey S. Hammond (Principal Analyst at Forrester Research): Hammond will present recent data that shows increased developer adoption of open source platforms, frameworks and development processes as well as heightened awareness by IT management of the benefits of a mixed source development model.
• Ravi Simhambhatla (Vice President & CIO at Virgin America): Simhambhatla will share with LinuxCon attendees how he sold the use of Linux and open source to internal colleagues and how he and his teams are maximizing it today.
• Eben Moglen (Director of the Software Freedom Law Center): Moglen will discuss legal defense strategies for Linux and open source software projects, including an update on GPLv2 and GPLv3 adoption.

In addition to keynote speakers, LinuxCon will feature focused sessions, termed "mini-summits", that provide opportunities for developers to work side-by-side on their particular project. The following sessions are already on the schedule, though the Foundation notes that others may be added: KVM Forum, Linux Storage & Filesystems Workshop, Xen Directions, Linux Security, Bluetooth, Tracing, and Power Management.

Also, if you considered registering early, but held out for a peek at the schedule, you're in luck. The deadline for Early Bird registration, which was extended until April 30th, has been re-extended through Thursday, May 6th. Now you can see what you're registering for and save $100 — but you'd better do it quick.