Last weekend I had the pleasure of attending the 2nd Ontario Linux Fest, in Toronto, Canada. Brian Leonard had a talk accepted there but couldn't make it, so I offered to fill in for him. The event started on Friday night with a reception for anyone who had already made it to the area, I was somewhat jet lagged from the trip but made it and had the opportunity to talk to some of the folks attending it. The event took off on Saturday morning, four/five presentations/hour from 9am to 6pm (check out the schedule). The topics were well balanced from technical to legal and ideological aspects of FOSS.
The talk I presented was entitled "What Makes OpenSolaris Interesting", very demo oriented which was perfect for the clearly technically oriented audience. I gave an introduction to OpenSolaris, demoing all the desktop goodies that it currently has (snv99), followed by slides and demos of IPS, DTrace, ZFS, SMF, FMA and a quick slide about resource management (processors sets, zones, containers, branded zones). I chose to do a single slide followed by demo for each of these technologies.
IMO it went pretty well, even though I hit a few bumps throughout the talk. I think there were 15-20 people in the audience, a little over 10% of the Fest's attendance. Had some good questions and folks seemed interested. I took my laptop to the party at night and continued to demo OpenSolaris around.
Before I get into what I perceived to be people's opinion about OpenSolaris (which was generally good), let me repeat what I said throughout the weekend: it was a pleasure and a privilege to be invited to a Linux event. Regardless of the fact that we're talking about competing OSes, we're all interested in providing the best solutions to the market. I truly appreciate the opportunity to go there and show some of the features of the system I believe offers the best ones.
The overall reaction was good, everyone I talked to seemed interested in what OS has to offer. Hopefully, my presentation and the demos were enough to get some of them to try OpenSolaris.
During the Intellectual Property and Open Source talk, the speaker said that you can still write closed source modules/drivers with CDDL. Me being anything but an expert in licenses and in a Linux conference, I didn't object, but that didn't sound right. Please feel free to comment on this point, I'd like to learn more about it.
While talking to a Linux community leader from the US, she told me about trying OpenSolaris when it first came out but since it wasn't clear to her at that time whether it was really open source or not, she did not continue to use it. But she was positively impressed about the current state of the system - she was surprised when I told her that the screen she was looking at was an OpenSolaris session.
I heard some complaints from people who tried 2008.05 but the LiveCD failed to boot, or the system became unresponsive at some point. Lack of drivers, specially for network devices, was another one. But I assured that person that a lot has been accomplished in that respect, and even more should follow.
Jeremy Allison, who works on Samba at Google, said he thinks Linux might go to GPLv3 if ZFS goes too. He seemed interested in that, as he believes v3 is the way to go.
John 'maddog' Hall gave the closing keynote and talked about sustainable computing. He brought up some good points, but I was particularly pleased to hear him mention improvements that the Linux kernel needs to become more power efficient. He listed changes to the dispatcher, which is one of the projects that the Power Management Community has been working on for some time, and should deliver the changes to ON very soon. There is a patch for the Linux kernel that addresses that, but that's all I know about it. Again, comments are welcome.
Summing up, I think we'll see some growth of OpenSolaris users in Canada - note that I'm not quantifying the growth. It was great to be a part of a grass roots effort such as the Ontario Linux Fest. Gotta admire what a dedicated community is capable of. Congrats to the organizers and the volunteers, it was a great event.
