OSDevCon Keynote notes & University Challenge Winner
March 1, 2007
Dahlem-Dorf, Berlin Germany
German Unix User Group
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Detlef Drewanz gave the conference introduction, he leads the GUUG. I got some initial questions while waiting for things to get started, as follows:
0. Are you from Marketing?
1. Is the documentation source on opensolaris the same as the docs.sun.com?
2. I've downloaded it once and did not want to grep through the HTML, need PDF instead in order to search.
[note] I continue to believe that the sources will be important in the future, they are not that interesting now. No, not from Marketing. Yes, the sources are the same as those on docs.sun.com.
[note] I need to be sure to link to Privilege Bracketing HOWTO from bigdoclist on Docs Community:
http://opensolaris.org/os/community/security/library/howto/privbracket
Telephony summit and other conferences are hosted by GUUG in Germany for many years, at least 14 years ago, 1994 first Linux conference/congress summit, no one commercially using it at that time, built up a community, put together lot of interesting projects through the congress. Good contacts with professionals in solaris/opensolaris, so they concluded that there must be an OpenSolaris conference to achieve the same things as they did with the Linux congress.
In parallel to this conference there is GUUG conference ongoing in same building, UNIX administration topics will be covered. Now on to Simon's keynote. Casper Dik was not able to join us this week. Next time we do this conference will be in 2008. The entire line of OpenSolaris distribution maintainers are here with us.
Simon Phipp's Keynote:
[Announcement: get your free OpenSolaris starter kit!]
Simon introduced Java to IBM in 1995, didn't seem important at the time. Similar situation today in this conference, note this date because it is the beginning of something big.
Back in 1991, traveling on business talking to people about video conferencing. Different times, telephones, cash and traveler's checks, slow post, etc. Today, credit cards, e-tickets, mobile phone, email.
Suggestion that we've reached the end of the consumer age, it is history. Topology has changed, from governments at the center and consumers at the spokes, to a meshed topology, where everyone is in the middle, anyone may post a question, vote on the issues raised and government responds. Heading back to pre-industrial-revolution society, world is a village. This new topology changes the way you handle security, technology, government.
Not just boundaries anymore, it must work with digital identity. Software, not monolithic systems, but small loosely joined pieces, service oriented. Pricing, vendor was at the hub in the past, now must bring focus to the value. Marketing, once produced polished messages, but consumers are now participants in that conversation. Development was a closed room, now statistically all smart people are outside the closed room, now open the room, open source.
What is open source? Fundamentally, the work of a community of developers. Sharing code commons and creating wealth from the commons. What makes you feel rich? Open Source puts the means of production in the hands of the people, with perfect visibility.
Ecosystem:
Artisan: licenses software through free commons
Co-developer: makes changes that he feels create richness, then contributes back in order to minimize the cost of maintenance of that richness:
-Licenses either allow you to create richness or not
-Governance makes room to contribute back, commit rights, open SCM
-Motivational models, numbers of models indicate health
o do all participants of the community work for same company, speak same language, have no arguments? If so, these might be a sign of poor health.
-Patent protection comes from good governance.
Deploy-developers: change in the way you get your software is most important, acquisition.
End-user: change in the value inside the software bundle, making choices about how you spend money, by identifying some value and paying for it.
Sun returning to our roots as a software company working with
community to create richness.
Question: why is Sun giving money to FSF?
Sun saw FSF group helping us to license Java, working on OpenJdk, so we thought it important to support them because they share our values. Does this splinter?? [not sure of the question] There is Sun part of world and GNU part of world? Simon: no there isn't, we can come together. There is much more that unites than divides.
Question: Debian: GNU and solaris kernel, have there been continued discussions of Debian working with opensolaris as supported kernel? Simon: it is a long process, will continue to be so, but there is progress in that a sun employee is on way to becoming a Debian committer, less fighting between the groups today, but long way to go.
Announcement S10 University challenge contest 2006:
November 2005-June 2006, showcase, 330 entries from 15 countries.
Dr. Sergej Alekseev and Gunter Stiege Oldenburg University for JDLabAgent and debugging agent for automatic Generation and Analysis of Tracing. Like a flight recorder for Solaris system, uses DTrace, but extends with graph theoretical algorithms, finds a subset of monitoring points and reconstructs events from this. next, java debugging lab architecture. JDLabAgent is shared object loaded into JVM then uses front-end for analysis of kernel flow.
http://jdlabagent.sourceforge.org LGPL
http://jdlabstudio.sourceforge.org GPL
Reward $5,000 student workstation and 100K HW donation to University from Sun.
