rv's techblog: some kind of blog

A organização do FISL 10 começou a anunciar as palestras da próxima edição. Pra quem não conhece, FISL é o Fórum Internacional de Software Livre. Acontece todo ano em Porto Alegre, geralmente em abril, mas uns dois meses mais tarde este ano. É o maior evento de FOSS na América Latina, terceiro no mundo, até onde eu saiba.

Eu havia inscrito quatro palestras: duas sobre DTrace (nas trilhas de administração de sistemas e de ferramentas de desenvolvimento), uma sobre OpenSolaris chamada 'OpenSolaris em 45 Minutos', uma versão atualizada da palestra que fiz no Ontario Linux Fest ano passado (incrível que ja se passaram oito meses), e uma sobre o escalonador, que foi a aceita. O FISL é conhecido por não aceitar mais de uma palestra por palestrante, com algumas excessões.

Apesar de estar muito contente com a seleção desta palestra, confesso que esperava ter uma das palestras sobre DTrace selecionadas, ja que é um assunto mais recente/novo/atual. DTrace não é muito difundido no Brasil, nos ainda temos que superar alguns problemas básicos de adoção, talvez isso explique. Mas tendo usado DTrace diariamente nos últimos dois anos, é difícil imaginar pessoas desenvolvendo e gerenciando seus sistemas sem. Talvez esteja faltando perspectiva da minha parte, mas gostaria de demonstrar DTrace para uma audiência maior no Brasil - o que vai acontecer de qualquer jeito durante o Fórum, junto a parte reservada aos grupos de usuários, um pequeno grupo de pessoas de cada vez como sempre acontece.

Outra coisa interessante foi que todas as quatro propostas receberam comentários positivos dos avaliadores. O que novamente prova que as pessoas estão abertas ao OpenSolaris como uma alternativa a outros sistemas operacionais. Mas a taxa atual de crescimento e de atividades mostra que não estamos tirando proveito disto. Pensando sobre esse problema, a unica solução que encontro é conhecimento. Acho que a comunidade deve promover mais eventos técnicos no Brasil, assim como o Front Range OSUG nos EUA, ou o Tokyo OSUG, ou outros grupos mais ativos sobre os quais sempre lemos. Acredito que disseminar conhecimento é a melhor maneira de crescer nossa comunidade.

Para isso, o Porto Alegre OSUG realizara um Workshop de DTrace no dia primeiro de Junho, para o lançamento do OpenSolaris 2009.06. Como uma maneira também de prepararmos o grupo para o FISL. Também teremos outros eventos ao longo do mês, incluindo um OpenSolaris Tour na semana do Fórum.

De qualquer maneira, se você estiver planejando participar do FISL esse ano, apareça na stand do Grupo de Usuários de OpenSolaris de Porto Alegre. Não vai ser difícil nos encontrar.

The FISL 10 committee started announcing the list of talks that were accepted for this year's Forum. For those who never heard of it, FISL is the International Free Software Forum. Takes place in Porto Alegre, Brazil, every year usually at the end of April, moved up a couple of months this year. It's the biggest FOSS event in Latin America, third in the world last I heard.

I submitted four talks: two on DTrace (for the sysadmin and developer tools tracks), one on OpenSolaris called 'OpenSolaris in 45 Minutes', which is an updated version of the talk I have at the Ontario Linux Fest last year (can't believe it's been almost eight months already), and one on the scheduler, which is the one that got accepted. FISL is known for not accepting more than one talk per speaker.

Although I'm very excited about doing this talk, I was actually hoping/expecting that one of the DTrace talks would be accepted since it's a more recent/new/trendy subject. DTrace is not very well known in Brazil, we still have to overcome more basic adoption problems, maybe that explains it. But having used it on a daily basis for the last couple of years, it's hard to imagine people developing and running their systems without it. Maybe I'm lacking some perspective here, but I was hoping to be able to demonstrate DTrace to a large audience - which will happen anyway, at the floor, one small group of people at a time as it always does.

Another thing that was interesting is that all four talks got really good reviews and comments. Which again proves that people are still open to OpenSolaris as an alternative to other OSes. But the current community growth rate and activity in BR show that we are not taking advantage of that. I've been thinking about this for a good amount of time, and the only answer I can think of is knowledge. I think we as a community need to promote more technical events in Brazil, much like the Front Rage OSUG in the US, or the Tokyo OSUG, or other active OSUGs we always read about. Disseminating knowledge, I think, is the best way to grow our community.

To that end, the Porto Alegre OSUG is doing a DTrace Workshop on June 1st, for the 2009.06 launch. I think it would be much more effective if all the group members participating in FISL were fluent in DTrace, or ZFS, or Zones, .. We're also having a few other events throughout the month, as well as an OpenSolaris Tour just before FISL. Should be fun.

Anyway, if you're making your way down to FISL this year, please stop by and say hi. We'll be easy to spot.

Just getting back to writing here, so I'll try to catch up with some of what happened over the last month or so.

On September 29th, the Porto Alegre OpenSolaris User Group along with RSJUG held a big event for Software Freedom Day. The groups organized a full day of talks around OpenSolaris, Java and open source technologies. We had around 150 registrations, but not all of those showed up (not sure why tho).

On the OpenSolaris side, we had talks about how to install the system, PostgreSQL on OpenSolaris, ZFS and one on what makes OpenSolaris interesting. Good to see everyone again, and even better to see the group growing at a good, steady rate.

You can check out some photos here and here.

Congrats to everyone in the group for setting this up, specially Vitorio Sassi who almost had a heart attack organizing the event :)

Last week, the Porto Alegre OSUG proposed and voted a set of ground rules for the group. The need for these rules appeared early on, when the group was still struggling with what to do about meetings, membership and leadership, and became a recurrent topic in meetings. So after last month's meeting an initial set of rules was proposed, modified over the following week and voted and accepted earlier this week.

We posted the rules in our website, but since this might be of interest to other groups around the community, here's the translated version (the translation is a bit rough around the edges, but should be enough to get the point(s) across).

PoaOSUG's ground rules

This set of rules was voted and is valid as of July 31st 2008.

1. Constitution and rules

(a) the Porto Alegre OpenSolaris User Group has as main objective to promote OpenSolaris technologies through events and activities in the southern region of Brazil and similar events at the national and international levels;

(b) the group is affiliated to the OpenSolaris.org community and as such, respects its rules;

(c) this set of rules aims at organizing the different aspects of the group's activities with the intent to promote and encourage its member's commitment to the group and its events;

(d) any decision made by the group must follow the rules described in section 4, including modifications to this set of rules.

2. Meetings

(a) the group holds meetings at every last Thursday of each month. In case of a holiday, the group will decide whether the meeting should take place a week before or after during the previous month's meeting;

(b) each meeting has 70 minutes in duration at the most, being the first 25 minutes for general topics and the remaining 45 for one or more presentations;

(c) the group maintains a calendar of the upcoming meetings, as well as the material used during the previous meetings, available through its website;

(d) in case a member who has a presentation scheduled learns that he/she won't be able to attend the meeting, he/she must notify the group with at least two weeks before the event with a justification. The presentation will be rescheduled to the end of the queue in case the member does not comply with this rule;

(e) any member of the group can propose a talk/presentation on any OpenSolaris related subject of at least 15 minutes;

(f) in case there are no scheduled presentation(s) for a given meeting, the group's leaders are responsible for creating presenting a talk, inviting next month's speaker or to cancel the meeting. Meetings must always have a presentation or talk;

(g) the decision to call a meeting off is entirely up to the leaders, and must be taken with at least a week's notice.

3. Leadership

(a) the group's leaders are elected by the mechanism described in section 4. Any member can propose his/hers nomination as a leader through an email to the alias with the proposal and its justification;

(b) a leader can cease being a leader in case a member of the group propose that leader's loss of leadership through an email to the alias, or in case the leader him/herself decides not to continue to be a leader;

(c) the leaders are responsible for the meetings/events calendar and the organization of such, as well as the distribution of giveaways and creating flyers, posters and others;

(d) it's up to the leaders to set aside a few t-shirts and giveaway items to award the participation of members and encourage them to be more active in the community, etc.

4. Voting

(a) for the approval of a proposal, it must receive two favorable votes (not counting the member who proposed it) e none against (not counting the leader in case it's a proposal to remove him/her);

(b) a proposal must be approved or rejected in exactly seven days after the first proposal;

(c) a rejected proposal can only be re-proposed seven days after its rejection. In Case of a new rejection, the same proposal cannot be re-evaluated before a month;

(d) proposals must be submitted to the alias with the tag '[proposal]' at the beggining of the 'subject' field. Proposals will not be valid if they are not properly identified. This rule tries to guarantee that every member can easily identify the need for a vote;

(e) to elect or remove a leader, two votes in favor and no vote against are necessary (excluding the leader in question in the case of a proposition for removal). Any member can nominate another member for group leadership, as well as a self nomination. In the case of a nomination by a third member, the nominee must accept his/hers nomination prior to a vote.

So this year's FISL program appeared to be centered around community, web and scripting languages. On the first day I saw Josh Berkus' talk on database security. Which was very good, he's a great speaker and the subject is always an interesting one.

I had a presentation on OpenSolaris Testing on the second day, filling in for Jim Walker who couldn't make it to the event. I translated Jim's slide deck to BR-Pt and added a couple of pages introducing OpenSolaris, as I felt a good part of the audience would be new to the project.

The talk went smoothly, I started by asking how many people knew about OpenSolaris and got mixed responses. So I went on to talk about the basics of the project and the features that set it a part from other OS'es, the structure of the community and opensolaris.org, and the distributions (thanks to Thirtankar Das for the distro slide).

I talked about the Testing Community, TET, STF, the source browser and got to the demo part. Fortunately, the network connection came up just when I started to show the Self-Service Testing project and, a few slides later, the Test-Farm. People seemed interested in the infra-structure and how simple it is to submit a test run. Got a few questions about the automation software and the findleaks test afterwards.

Josh Berkus' 'Safe Data is Happy Data'

myself on OpenSolaris Testing

Theodore Ts'o's EXT4 Talk

Later on the same day I attended Theodore Ts'o's talk on the Linux kernel. It turned out to be a very informal Q&A, giving an opportunity to get his opinion on OpenSolaris. I didn't want to turn the thing into OpenSolaris at all, so I waited half way through the questions and asked him his opinion on the OpenSolaris Project and technologies like DTrace and ZFS. He gave a neutral and somewhat political answer with interesting considerations. Yesterday I found out that he recently expressed some critics about the project on his blog, which was in part responsible for a very interesting conversation on the OpenSolaris Advocacy alias over the last couple of days.

On the last day I attended another talk by Ts'o on the EXT4 file system, which IIRC will emerge early next year. I'm far from an EXT# expert, but I had the impression that it is mainly a follow up to EXT3 that extends bit depth ona few key fields. None of the new features drew my attention - maybe lazy write backs, but that's not really new, is it (honest question) ?

Over all I wish there were more kernel and performance related talks, so I'll definitely submit a couple of presentations for next year's. I'm pretty sure there are a good amount of people interested in OS' kernels in that part of the world.

FISL is always a great experience, if not for the varied program of talks and speakers, then for the incredible community environment. In three days the organization gathered over 7k people to talk, discuss and learn about open source, free software and a huge array of technologies.

Following what PoA-OSUG did last year, the group was out there spreading the word about OpenSolaris to something like 4-500 people over the three days. I had different commitments during the event, so unfortunately I couldn't stay with the group for the whole thing. But I did manage to lose my voice by the end of the first day, alternating between Sun's and the group's booth :)

I eventually chose to stay with the OSUG rather than at Sun's booth because I noticed that a lot of people, usually students, were a bit shy to approach some of us. While the UG folks were constantly flooded with people asking all sorts of questions and had a more open environment.

While over there I talked to students, professors, sysadmins, developers and business folks. We demo'ed DTrace, ZFS, MDB and other basic features and functionalities of the systems. I saw around 10 laptops installing SXDE and helped with some installer and driver issues. One professor from a local private college brought over CS students to do research on Operating Systems, so we ended up beeing interviewed by 4-5 different groups. IT professionals from areas like database, web infra-structure, Java, even a couple of guys from the air force showed up.

What was also very interesting to see were new local companies with products and services based around OSS, more than I recall seeing at last year's. From the BR government (in all of its instances) to the new guys starting their business, OSS has become a big part of the society. Not only generating revenue but being used to drive social changes. Inclusion, freedom of information, education, and source of revenue were all there.

FISL 9

PoA-OSUG

Sun

OLPC

On the last day I went over to the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) booth and borrowed one to try to install OpenSolaris 2008.05. Didn't get much luck as it can only boot from EXT2 or JFFS file images. The fact that we could barely get online also didn't help (since the air was saturated for most of the event), but it was worth a shot.

Looking forward to next year's. And if you need yet another reason to be there, the next one will be its 10th edition ;)