Matt Ingenthron's Stream of Consciousness

Tuesday February 13, 2007

Complete Open Source Stack at SCALE5x

Some time back, those who organize SCALE, a Southern California Open Source Expo, checked in with a couple of us at Sun to see if we'd like to be involved.  After all, Sun's pretty heavily involved and committed to Open Source these days.  Through the Los Angeles Unix community, I knew a number of the attendees as well.  

Since Sun is, to my knowledge, the company with the most complete Open Source stack, I thought it made sense at an Open Source expo to talk about that.  I figured most of the community knew about OpenSolaris (even though they were using other Unix-like operating system kernels with their GNU userspace).  Most of the community would not, unless you track Sun pretty closely, know about many of the other big projects: OpenSPARC, OpenJDK, CoolStack (released today as Solaris + AMP), PostgreSQL, Netbeans, project Glassfish and project jMaki.  So, I submitted a talk, which was accepted:

A Complete Open Source Stack: Hardware to Web 2.0*

That afforded me an opportunity to spread the word, show off the system, show off the software features like DTrace and ZFS.  It also gave me plenty of opportunity to talk about what Sun is doing that's different than the other commercial Unix and unix-like distros that run on x64 and SPARC.

As things came together, I found that Josh Berkus, fellow Sun Employee who is well known in the PostgreSQL community specifically and the Open Source community in general, was going to be at the PostgreSQL part of the show.  I invited Josh to be part of my session, and he accepted.  I think this added another whole aspect to the talk.

My talk, like many of them, was very well attended.  The room was full, and there were people standing in the back of the room.

Another advantage of these community events is networking and learning what others are working on.  There were definitely some surprises, and clearly some people are pushing the limits of the technology.  I had a few good conversations with people about Xen and how they're using it, and a number of good conversations about how people are putting together these modern web tier applicaitons in a virtualized space.

On the last few days, in the last few minutes, we had the opportunity to put together an OpenSolaris BOF session.  That did come together, and I gave a few updates on the OpenSolaris happenings.  We also decided in that meeting to create at least a virtual OpenSolaris user group of some sort (perhaps a UUASC associated SIG) here in Southern CA.

It was definitely a worthwhile experience and I want to thank the SCALE folks for having us.  I just got an email saying they had record attendance, so I'd expect that means it will be coming again next year. 

There was only one unfortunate thing.  It only came up twice, but some people looked at the "L" in the title and immediately assumed that Sun had no interest in a Linux expo. 

I have two responses for that.  First, it's very hard to say Sun has not made contributions to Linux.  It's probably true that Sun doesn't employ full-time kernel hackers, but Sun has contributed drivers, interoperability fixes and kernel fixes.  In my tenure at Sun, I've seen this done more than once.  Even then, Linux is more than a kernel.  I don't think it's possible to have a regional meetup of this size that would have only kernel hackers.  Sun's made numerous contributions to Open Source which are part of all of the modern distros.

Secondly, the SCALE event, despite the L, is not just about Linux.  Have a look at their about page.  It's an event for building the community of Open Source. 

In the end, pretty much everyone I talked to was happy to see Sun there and is happy to hear of Sun's work in Open Source. 

I was, in good spirits of course, accosted by a gentleman from IBM at the Sun booth about this very topic.  His question was what Sun is doing there at a Linux conference.  I reminded him of the above, and then proceeded to ask when components of Websphere will be Open Sourced, or when IBM will Open Source Power.

Admittedly, he and I are two leaf nodes in our respective organizations, so I'm sure he couldn't speak for IBM any more than I can speak for all of Sun, but the answers were telling.  He said he didn't see any need to Open Source Websphere.  In his estimation, no one is looking for the source.  He also said there was no need to Open Source Power 5 or Power 6.  In his estimation, if someone wants the specifications to the Power architecture, the community at Power.org has that for a nominal fee.

Of course, those in the know would be aware that IBM did apply an Open Source banner to a small part of the Websphere universe by acquiring a company and rebranding it Websphere Application Server Community Edition (even though there are major differences in the codebase between that and the WAS they'll sell you).  Those in the know would also recognize that what is at Power.org is much more like what's at sparcinternational.com and has been for over a decade.  Joining power.org and paying the (higher) fees to read the specs is more like being given the man pages with the opportunity to go write the code that implements the man page.  OpenSPARC is more like being given the code, the build scripts and the unit tests to go extend the most unique thread-rich chip anyone's been given access to yet.

This does seem to show, once again, that people get open standards and Open Source confused.  Adopters of OpenSPARC get both-- adopters of the power architecture get only one.

* By the way, I know that some take issue with the term Web 2.0, and I think I probably agree with the arguments against.  Having said that, I think we all admit it draws a crowd.