OSCON Summarized: Community, Cash, and Clouds

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July 22, 2010

OSCON is worth attending, or at least watching from a distance, if for no other reason than it gives a pretty clear picture of what the developer community and industry around open source is thinking about. To sum up OSCON 2010 in three words, it’s community, cash, and clouds.

Code is in there somewhere, too, but it’s more or less assumed you’re talking about code when you talk about OSCON. Great event, but not so much at OSCON for the admin set.

So why cash, community, and clouds? Obviously, cloud services or software have generated the biggest buzz in the last year. A hefty number of talks have touched on cloud in one way or another. OSCON always draws a lot of community talks, and there’s also the usual set of “how do we make money on this open source thing?” talks. So far I haven’t heard anything new or innovative on the topic of making money with open source at OSCON 2010, but it’s very much on people’s minds.

The biggest announcement, or at least the announcement with the most buzz on the floor, involved all three of the C words: Rackspace’s OpenStack. What’s that? If you haven’t caught all the press about it, OpenStack is a fully open source stack for organizations to provide cloud computing services on standard hardware. It’s all available under the Apache 2.0 license and it’s all about clouds, cash, and community. The cloud connection is obvious.

Cash? OpenStack is about saving cash for organizations, by helping them avoid lock-in. To deploy OpenStack, you’re going to have to spend money somewhere, but organizations will have a choice how they want to spread the money around and if they want to invest in their own infrastructure, manpower, and deployment time, or if they want to pay a vendor like Rackspace to handle most of that for them.

Community? The developers and folks I spoke to at OSCON were pretty excited about OpenStack. It’s the right software at the right time, and from an organization that’s been doing good things by the community. Rackspace racked up some significant goodwill earlier this year when they hired most of the Drizzle team away from the dying husk of Sun and let them continue doing Drizzle development. Several of the folks I spoke to were eager to be involved with OpenStack on some level. They’ve also tapped into the right side of the open core debate by being fully open with OpenStack, as opposed to offering proprietary services on top of an open core. Not that the open core model is inherently wrong, but it doesn’t float well with community. Customers, usually, but the developer community doesn’t generally get as enthused about an open core project.

It’s All Too Much!

Of course, that’s not all that OSCON is about. The event has something like nine tracks running concurrently on Wednesday through Friday, with six regular sessions during each track. Plus a slew of short keynotes, and after-hours birds of a feather, plus more vendor parties than you can shake a stick at in the evening. It would not be entirely untrue to say that the common theme running through every OSCON I’ve attended is “free alcohol,” mixed liberally with developers.

There’s far too much to take in at the event, is the bottom line. It takes some work to narrow down a schedule of talks to the most important and also leave enough time to hit the exhibit hall and participate in the “hallway track.”

What’s Missing?

What isn’t at OSCON? Well, lots of things aren’t at OSCON, but one thing that’s really caught my notice is the fact that Linux doesn’t get much attention at OSCON. This has been true for a few years, but it seems particularly evident this year. Scanning the talks, I find almost nothing related to distribution development.

At first glance this might seem a bit worrying, but it’s really just a sign of how mainstream Linux has become coupled with the fact that Linux has its own very healthy ecosystem of shows. We’ve got LinuxCon coming up in August, Linux.conf.au in January, and a slew of LinuxFests (like Ohio LinuxFest coming up in September) year-round. Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE each have their own community events, and so on. The open source community has grown mainstream enough, and diverse enough, that OSCON can address a subset of the open source developer audience and still be bursting at the seams.

If you haven’t attended an OSCON, and you do development around open source applications, databases, mobile devices, or Web and cloud services, I strongly recommend it. Especially now that O’Reilly has returned OSCON to Portland after an ill-advised year of exile in California. The company runs a tight ship and puts on a great program. See you in Portland in 2011!

Oracle Looks to Calm Sun Customer Concerns

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internetnews.com

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July 22, 2010

A Garter report found that Sun customers aren’t happy with the flow of information from the company’s new owner. Now Oracle is moving to calm frustrated Sun users.

Can One Sponsor Sustain a FOSS Project on the Long Term?

By

FOSSBazaar

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July 22, 2010

These days I am receiving quite a number of mails that ask the same question: If a FOSS project is sponsored by only one company or entity, do you think it’s a healthy project?

In order to answer this question, we need to define some terms first. Let’s start by the term “sponsor”. By sponsor we mean an entity (company, NGO, Government) that provides certain types of resources. We can think of resources as roughly falling into three categories: infrastructure (website, tools, etc.), contributors (developers, engineers) and funding. Of course by providing infrastructure and contributors, the sponsor provides funding indirectly as well. But if we break the notion of sponsoring into these three different kinds of resources investment and sharing, we can already see that the answer is not as straightforward as it may have seem at first sight.

Drupal Can And Should Become Friendlier For Users

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OStatic

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July 22, 2010

As we noted when April’s DrupalCon conference took place in San Francisco, the open source content management system Drupal has gained substantial momentum. There are many trends driving its momentum, including adoption by publishers seeking more cost-effective content platforms, and the fast-growing sophistication of the platform. We know about that last issue well at OStatic, because our site runs on Drupal. Now, though, there are many people wondering if the next step for Drupal is to extend beyond its open source roots, possibly alienating some people.

Google’s Nexus One Exit Has Chrome OS Implications

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OStatic

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July 22, 2010

Now that Google has announced that it has received its final shipment of Nexus One phones and will be exiting its Nexus One phone business altogether, what should we make of the company’s decision? Google is well-known for starting projects that it later abandons, so was the Nexus One just a misstep?

Google was reputed to have “a Google phone” in the works long before the Nexus One ever arrived. When it did arrive, it gave birth to many headlines claiming that Motorola and other early Android handset makers were upset at having to compete with Google.

Got MeeGo? OSCON Keynote by Dirk Hohndel

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MeeGo Blog

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July 21, 2010

Today is the first day of the main OSCON event here in lovely Portland, Oregon, and we were fortunate to have a MeeGo presentation during the opening keynotes. Here is a brief summary of what Dirk Hohndel covered during his time on stage.

Dirk kicked off the keynote with his perspective on mobile computing to set the context for why projects like MeeGo are so interesting. He said that mobile computing has become so natural that we don’t think about how special it is to have easy access to information in a form that is always connected and portable enough to be easily carried around wherever we go.

Read more at Dawn Foster’s MeeGo entry.

Report: Linux Command Line vs. Graphical Interface

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LinuxPlanet

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July 21, 2010

In the Linux desktop world, the graphical user interface is here to stay. Without all the efforts poured into GNOME, KDE, Xfce and others, Linux would not be as successful as it is today. Still, the command line continues to have distinct advantages over the desktop. Bruce Byfield sorts out the perennial CLI vs. graphical interface battle.

Juniper Sees Lift From Carriers, Enterprise IT

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internetnews.com

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July 21, 2010

Networking firm Juniper appears to be enjoying the benefits of the economic recovery, topping analysts’ expectations for its second-quarter earnings thanks to increased sales.

Creates a whole new painting tool for GIMP

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July 21, 2010

The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is a robust application for editing and manipulating digital images. In this article, you will learn how to get started with the GIMP code, how to build the project from the Git repositories, and how to find your way around the code tree. And you will build an example application that creates a whole new painting tool for the program.

LinuxCon Preview: Is FOSS Becoming More About What Execs Need Than What Developers Want?

By

Jennifer Cloer

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July 21, 2010

Our latest in the LinuxCon Preview series takes a look at what Forrester Analyst Jeffrey Hammond will be sharing during his keynote at the event in three short weeks. One of the primary trends he will talk about is the level of awareness about Linux and open source at the executive level and how that is impacting who is making the software acquisition decisions going forward.

You were on a panel at LinuxCon last year. This year, you have a keynote slot all to yourself and will be talking about open source adoption trends in enterprise IT. Can you share with us at least one of those trends and the primary drivers for it?

Hammond: Sure – at the risk of tipping my hand a bit, there has been a big change in the awareness of open source at the executive level. The “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy is no more. This changes the opportunities that open source companies have; they’re likely to find the door to the corner office more open than ever. But this also means that the way that we use FOSS in the enterprise will change, as it becomes less about what developers want, and more about what execs need.

Forrester has a fairly new Developer Technographic Research tool. Can you tell us more about it and what you’re finding out about development trends?

Hammond: It’s pretty simple – the best opinions about what’s going on in the market are those that are informed by quantitative data. If you believe that developers are leading indicators of technology adoption, then it’s worth analyzing what tools, devices, and operating systems they are using as a long-term predictor of the movement of technology. We try to collect this data on a regular basis so we can look for changes, like the emergence of open source ALM tools, as an example.

You recently found that a new generation of developers is choosing to deploy web and enterprise apps on Linux. Why?

Hammond: It comes down to barriers of adoption. As a developer you can download a LAMP stack or Spring and Tomcat and start work, or you can wrangle with purchasing for eight weeks and try to get the licenses you need. Developers generally don’t like spending time sitting on their hands waiting for purchasing agents to make them jump through hoops; they’d rather write code.

Your research has also indicated that the choice to deploy Linux and open source is no longer just about cost. What are the primary drivers for adopting Linux and open source today?

Hammond: Long term we see two trends that emerge. One is about flexibility – in sourcing, support, and deployment. The other driver is that over time, the use of OSS tends to change the culture of development shops. It increases developer engagement and tends to attract developers with a higher degree of intrinsic motivation to the shops that use it.

Increasing adoption also means increasing expectations. What do open source vendors and community members need to do to help IT managers deploy these technologies?

Hammond: The focus on easy installation and set-up use cases has to improve. I’d also say that the project structure that requires IT contributions to be assessed and integrated all the way to the committer status must change. Licenses that don’t require IT contribution of changes are also useful, at least until management gets more comfortable so that they can contribute without exposing themselves to additional legal risk.