Sun @ FOSS.IN 2008

Parthasarathi Susarla (a.k.a Partha) conducted a hugely successful 3-hour workout session on 'Profile GNOME using DTrace'. 

Here is more on the session from FOSS.IN website:

Gnome users quite frequently get to a point when they feel fail to see the Gnome perform and crumbling under its own weight. As developers a lot of us have attempted to profile Gnome (and its applications), mostly unsuccessfully. And even if we get to profiling an application, post-processing is a nightmare. In this work-out we intent to provide means to solve concrete performance problems. The work-out intends to result in a adding Dtrace probes to core gnome modules/libraries/applications such as glib/gtk. This would involve the coming together of Gnome developers and Dtrace contributors and users. The event will facilitate exchange of ideas/code between the Gnome Developers(from both Linux and Solaris) and Dtrace users. The workout will result in instrumenting Dtrace probes in Gnome.

Hear Partha share his experience on the workout:

If you are attending FOSS.IN, head to the JN Tata auditorium now. If you have always been interested to contribute to OpenSolaris, but did not know where to start...this is the place to be. Jim Grisanzio, Community Manager for OpenSolaris is providing some practical tips to contribute to the product.

Jim Grisanzio is also a top Sun blogger. We are fortunate to have him on all the five days of the FOSS.IN conference.  Thank you Jim!

Here is the link to Jim's presentation. "Ten quick ways to contribute to OpenSolaris" is part of the presentation.

Just concluded...a great session on free and open source by Simon Phipps. In his talk, Simon addressed several open questions on licensing, patents, and trademarks.

Notes from Simon's session

• Sun is the largest commercial contributor to open source
• Sun contributes to 750 free and open source software products
• Today, Apache software foundation and Ubuntu are very key to free software
• We operate in a "global mesh" as part of the FOSS community
• FOSS is an expression of change in society
• FOSS is not about saving money, it is about sovereignty
• Sun is engaging in open source to be part of the bigger community
• We need to learn how to handle software patents

Simon also talked about:

• Corporate behavior
• Trademark issues
• Transparency vs democracy
  

Simon also announced the "Sun Open Source Community Innovation Awards" in his talk.

Just concluded...a great session on the OpenOffice development scenario in India. Sankarshan Mukhopadhyay, an OpenOffice contributor himself gave a realistic picture of the development scene in India.

At the end of the presentation, Louis Suarez-Potts and Juergen Schmidt patiently answered these questions/ discussion points from the audience:

• Need to centralize all the documentation for OpenOffice
• Build issues that need fixing
• Getting the Government to adopt OpenOffice
• Numer of OpenOffice contributors
• Can I make money working for OpenOffice.org?

Louis suggested that the audience should check out the User Experience Project.

Seen below are Louis and Juergen tackling audience questions.

If you are attending FOSS.IN, come to seminar hall A/120. Juergen Schmidt is talking about OpenOffice programmability. 

An important part of Sun's open source software strategy is to build and nurture a strong community around each product. In the true spirit of this strategy, the "OpenSolaris Project Day" event was organized by BOSUG (Bangalore OpenSolaris User Group). The following presentations were made by active OpenSolaris community members:

"Distribution Constructor - A hands on workshop" by Anil Gulecha, Sun student tech lead and final year engineering student

"Going handson on OpenSolaris development" by Shivakumar GN, Nokia Siemens Networks

"Getting to know OpenSolaris codebase and the development environments" by Sriram Narayanan, Thoughtworks

"Contributing to OpenSolaris distros" by Komala R, Student of East West Institute of Technology

Click here for more information on the presentations.

Anil Gulecha, a final year engineering student held the audience in rapt attention as he talked about Distribution Constructor. Distro constructor is a part of the OpenSolaris binary distribution. It is a set of tools that allows user to roll their own distributions based on OpenSolaris.

Anil is a Sun student tech lead. When he created the LiveUSB toolkit for BeleniX as a third year engineering student, he had the world looking at him :-)

A section of those who attended Anil's talk.

You have probably heard of or read about Project Indiana. Project Indiana is working towards creating a binary distribution of an operating system built out of the OpenSolaris source code. Those who attended FOSS.IN got a chance to hear Moinak Ghosh, one of the leaders of this project.

Moinak's talk was aptly titled, Deep Dive into Project Indiana.

The focus of Glynn Foster's talk was how to contribute to OpenSolaris. Those who attended had some idea of OpenSolaris but did not know where to start. This talk was useful for them. A couple of folks in the audience were new to OpenSolaris.

Glynn talked about:

• Practical aspects of contributing to OpenSolaris
• Problems a developer would enter as he or she starts contributing
• How to work around these problems?
• Where to seek help?
  

Meet Juergen Schmidt, OpenOffice Architect at FOSS.IN this week.

In his own words...

My name is Juergen Schmidt and I am working since more than 10 years for Sun. And there in the StarOffice/OpenOffice project team. At FOSS.in I will give a presentation on general programmability feature of OpenOffice.org. And I will do a workshop where I will explain two demos step by step to introduce extensions development to my audience.

I am excited to be at FOSS.in (the first time) because I am happy to have the chance to spread and share my knowledge around the programmbility features of OpenOffice.org that is more than a simple office suite. Extensions are a good and much easier for developers to get started with OO.org code base. And extension developers of today are probably or hopefully the core developers of OO.org of tomorrow. I believe in open source and I think it is important to attract as much as possible developers to help all the different open source projects.

We are glad to have Glynn Foster, Product Manager for Project Indiana visit us next week. Glynn will speak on "Introduction to OpenSolaris".

More about Glynn:

Glynn has been working on the GNOME and JDS projects with Sun Microsystems for the past 7 years and more recently moved to the marketing team to work on Project Indiana and OpenSolaris. Glynn is a current GNOME Foundation Board Director and OpenSolaris Governing Board Member. Glynn is currently living in Wellington, New Zealand though is Irish by nature.

More about the topic - Introduction to OpenSolaris:

I will be speaking during the OpenSolaris Project Day, detailing the first steps that people can expect to take in the OpenSolaris project from a developer standpoint. This talk will introduce the various tools and resources that are available, and the process involved in contributing to the source base.

Why is Glynn excited to be attending FOSS.IN?

In his own words...

I've been hearing for years that it's the most incredible conference in terms of sheer enthusiasm - I'm looking forward to directly experiencing that myself.