Friday September 22, 2006

EuroOSCON - I'm done

In my last entry I had written that I was looking forward to attending the OpenSolaris BOF. Unfortunately, the attendance was a little disappointing. For those who had open enough minds to attend, we had an interesting and lively discussion about various Solaris features: SMF, Zones, ZFS, DTrace, ...

If only more of the conference attendees had open enough minds to think about other solutions to problems rather than just assuming that Linux is always the answer. I'm almost motivated to start a new Linux distro to help with all these problematic "nails". I'd like to call it Linux Hammer...

(For those of you who aren't familiar with the quote: "If the only tool you have is a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail." Abraham Maslow.)

In other news...

It's been pointed out to me that I can be very dour. In celebration of that fact, here are a few of the things that I hate about conferences.

• People who are so full of themselves that they can't wait to ask questions and interrupt the speakers.
• People who don't really have a question, but say something pointless so that everyone else can "admire" their cleverness.
• Speakers with very thinly disguised axes to grind.
• People who go from conference to conference, year after year repeating the same old crap that no-one else believes or cares about.
• Laptop envy
• People who follow Queen Elizabeth the First's bathing regime a little too carefully

I'm sure there's a lot more, but I'm trying to stay the right side of the dour/bitter divide and I'm getting close to crossing over. If anyone reads this and would like to contribute their own pet hates, feel free to add them as comments. The best ones will get no prizes whatsoever, but the authors can bask in whatever glory they feel they may have earned with their cleverness! :D

(2006-09-22 07:00:08.0) Permalink Comments [4]

Wednesday September 20, 2006

EuroOSCON - Day 2

OpenSolaris has a stall in the DotOrg Pavillion today and so the first order of business has been to work out which sessions I and my fellow OpenSolaris attendees want to attend so that we can work out a stand rota. That was surprisingly easy, since most people seemed to be very happy to spend time on the stand.

Democracy: A Hacker's Guide

This talk was presented by the Director of MySociety and I was interested to find out what kinds of tools they had created for re-formatting text for improved presentation on the web.

It was an interesting talk but the emphasis was not on the tools, but on the different processes and website that MySociety have produced. Interesting, but not for the reasons I expected and not terribly relevant.

I just spent some time on the stand and interest is high. We've given away about 30 developer kits and the general attitude of people stopping to chat with us is good. People are having trouble getting Nexenta to boot though as it's quite slow and not everyone has the patience to wait for it.

The Secret Sauce of Robust Developer Communities

This talk claims to provide the secret recipe for building open source communities...

Developer network maturity levels are described in the presentation. This is a useful formalism for identifying what you might need to do to improve collaboration and your community.

The examples of ebay, BEA and their developer community were provided.

Afternoon Keynotes

An interesting pair of keynotes. The first addressed the question of "Why does Second Life achieve such high levels, compared to other projects, of community participation?" No really clear answers, but I think the main conclusion was that a motivated community will contribute. The second was given by the CEO of MySQL and discussed the move of MySQL from being a European company to one based in Silicon Valley. It was lively and informative, the main reason for the move being that in general Americans encourage and reward the entrepeneurial spirit, whereas Europeans don't. A major laugh was the reward for the comment that a Finn saying "That's ok" is equivalent to an American saying "That's fantastic".

Open Source and Freedom: Why Open Standards Are Crucial to Protecting Your Linux Investment

Interestingly, this talk actually addresses the notion that "Open Standards" are more important to user technology choices than "Open Source". This is an argument that Sun has made for many years, at least since the publication of the NFS standard and arguably as far back as when the company was founded.

Unfortunately, the presenter seems locked into the idea that Linux is the only mechanism for promoting "Open Standards" which is a self-defeating view in my opinion. If an Operating System standard is truly "Open", then surely there is scope for competing in the marketplace for all vendors, not just those who favour Linux.

On the whole, I agreed with the message that standards are important, but I disagreed with many of the conclusions that he drew from this message.

The OpenSolaris BOF will be this evening. I'm looking forward to it and hope we get some interesting conversations started.

(2006-09-20 11:35:29.0) Permalink

Tuesday September 19, 2006

EuroOSCON - Day 1

Afternoon Keynotes

The keynotes this afternoon were on the subject of Open Data and Structured Data. The presenters made strong, persuasive arguments about the importance of these elements to the applications that we would like to develop for the web.

There were some good examples: OpenStreetMap, TheyWorkForYou.

Being a MySQL Developer

I attended a talk by Lars Thalmann about his personal experience in working for a closed source company which shifted to be an open source company. I was interested in attending this talk as there were obvious parallels with the situation for Sun and Solaris and the shift to OpenSolaris.

MySQL is a company of about 350 people, with contributors based in 25 countries. Lars explained that his company had originated as a research project based in Ericsson in the 1990's. At that time the goal was to develop a cluser database which could be used internally by Ericsson. This was then identified as a potential spin-off company and eventually became Alzato, which was a private company owned by Ericsson. Alzato sold the cluster database to external customers as well as supporting internal users. Alzato was purchaed by MySQL and the software, known as NDB, was integrated into the MySQL database server product family.

I asked Lars a few questions about external contributors as this was the area I was most curious to find out about. He told me that apart from the area of storage engine contributions, most contributions are at the level of bugfixes. More significant contributions have been made by former MySQL employees who have left the company and one major contribution was made by a developer who is now employed by MySQL. Many of the processes and procedures which Lars adopted on joining MySQL are exactly the same as those processes and procedures which we are using for the OpenSolaris project. For example: developers must sign release forms to contribute code, certain bug data is still held privately by MySQL AB and not shared with the wider development community.

Open Usability

Usability is an important part of the development of OSS. I can't honestly say I paid too much attention to this talk as I was just too tired and was busy writing up the MySQL session and thinking about other things.

Making It Work: How to Build a Successful Open Source Project

How to build an open source project. This should be interesting, especially since it's based around the openoffice.org project. Presented by a CollabNet employee.

OpenSolaris got a mention as an example of a sponsored project.

The list of things which Open Source projects should be was informative and, in my opinion, accurate. Right licence, Neutral environment, Transparent governance and processes, etc... See the slides for the full list. Interestingly a member of the audience said that he had practically the same list of characteristics when he talked about the Debian project back in 2002.

The OpenOffice.org project documentation is supposed to be good.

(2006-09-19 08:44:56.0) Permalink

EuroOSCON 2006

I've just arrived in Brussels where I'm attending EuroOSCON 2006. So far, things are going well. I'm checked in at the hotel, the room facilities are good and I've managed to get hold of the basic necessities of conference life: tote bag, schedule and exhibitor badge.

Only two negative points so far: my first planned session, Ubuntu: Community building for Human Beings, is cancelled (or re-scheduled, I can't work that out yet) and I don't think the hotel has a pool which scuppers my plans for additional Triathlon training before this weekend's event.

I now have a clash for this afternoon. Should I be dutiful and attend the "Being a MySQL developer" all about migrating closed-source to open-source companies - surely relevant to me? Or, should I attend the "Google Data API" talk, which just looks more interesting?

Decisions, decisions....

(2006-09-19 03:41:22.0) Permalink