After reading Ted Ts'o comments on OpenSolaris I cannot stop thinking about how partial someone can be. From Ted's point of view, OpenSolaris has failed to build a community (as published in Slashdot), and if you read his post, you would probably think he is right.

Well, I think he is.. but only from a Linux-centric point of view. Actually, if you assume that the Linux development model is the only way to develop F/OSS, he would probably be right. However, if you are more open-minded than that and you know about other F/OSS development models, you will probably know that OpenSolaris' and Linux's models are different, and of course both perfectly acceptable. In fact, each model has its own advantages.

Let's see how different both communities are. Firstly, Linux was born Free Software, while Solaris has been opened after a long time being a closed product. Have you thought about how difficult that process has been? That is a huge amount of tough work that the OpenSolaris community has done in order to liberate such a huge project.

Besides, the OpenSolaris development model is quite different because of a number of technical reasons. IMO, the first one is something as simple as that we want to ensure its quality by following a number of processes. Another very important technical point is that we want OpenSolaris to continue being binary compatible (ABI) with the previous Solaris revisions, which is something Linux could not even dream of. Again, nothing of that has anything to do with Ted's comments; the most important thing here is that, as long as the operating systems goals and objectives are different, their communities are different as well.

And please, do not get me wrong; I have nothing against Linux, nothing at all. In fact, I like it a lot. However, I do think that trying to compare Linux and OpenSolaris communities from a Linux-centric point of view is simply wrong and an unfair comparison. So next time someone feels the need to compare them, it would be so much better if he could base the comparison of each operating system technical merits. Obviously, both communities are different, we all know that.

A couple of days ago I went to UEM, the university where I obtained my CS degree. The LUG organized the "UEM: Free Knowledge conferences 2008" and they invited me to give a talk.

I'm glad they invited me, although I have to confess that it was kind of weird to be in the university again, remembering so many memories, checking what changed, and cheering people who I hadn't seen for about 5 years. It was like traveling back in time for a few hours.. and that made me realize how many things have changed - for good - after all these years :-)

If you are in Madrid, you are still on time to come along. It is worth attending.

There are sometimes when you play to be what you are not, and experience says that most of them end up in some sort of trouble. A few months ago, I played to be an OpenSolaris evangelist within a group of 4 more colleagues for a few weeks.

I must say that there were some tough days, there were even a few days when we had almost no sleep; but on the bright side, we met many people, we gave a bunch of talks on the technology that we develop, and of course we had a lot of fun.

Here is a video that the some Netbeans folks have compiled about one of the adventures we went trough. The story begins with: "In November of 2007,five Sun engineers had planed to fly from Buenos Aires to Cordoba, Argentina to present NetBeans and OpenSolaris at two universities.. ".

You wonder what happened. :-)

Here are a few pictures of the first day of the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit that is being held at the UT Supercomputing Center in Austin, Texas. It has been really interesting so far, and as you can see, it is also a quite big event:

A few months ago, I made the decision of stop traveling and attending conferences. I was spending almost all of my time traveling and giving talks, which left me very little time for doing real work.

However, I'm going to continue attending the most interesting conferences and meetings. It does not make much sense for me to spend months traveling as I did the past year, but it is definitely worth attending a few of them.

The Linux Collaboration Summit is one of these events, for instance. The second edition is taking place at the UT Supercomputing Center in Austin, Texas from April 8 to 10, 2008.

So, tomorrow I will be heading to Austin. It's a quite long trip from Spain, but if the meeting is as interesting as the first edition (held at Google, in SFO), it will be well spent time.