Port 25: The Open Source Community at Microsoft : Hank Janssen, Industry Conferences

PHP|Tek in Chicago

hjanssen — Thu, 28 May 2009 00:29:00 GMT

Last week I got the perfect excuse to get out of the Planning and Budget process that we are going through right now, attending PHP|Tek, which was a welcome escape as planning and budgeting in any company is usually enough fun to make a grown man cry!

So last week I went to PHP|Tek in Chicago to speak and meet folk from the PHP community. As always, I greatly enjoy meeting the people who write and use PHP, and I have been to and spoken with enough of the speakers at past events that I know a lot of the core people by first name.

Kind of funny that we now have gotten to the point inside of Microsoft that we are almost old hats at Open Source conferences

There were two days prior to the conference where a group of core PHP developers and community people talked about the state - past, present and future - of PHP. It was super cool to be invited to that one!

Unfortunately I was only able to join one of those two days: amazing that flying from Seattle to Chicago takes the better part of a day!

The discussions there where very wide ranging, from whether there will be a PHP 5.4, what 6.0 will bring, which bugs are current show stoppers, where PDO is going, etc. etc.

For me PHP|Tek remains a very nice ‘community' conference, where the focus is on the community of PHP and not the business/vendors of PHP.

These kinds of conferences are the best way to network, and it would take too long to talk about all the people I spoke to. But Elizabeth Smith and I talked about us writing documentation for php.net (I have been wanting to write the ‘how to build PHP for Windows' part) so hopefully look for more documentation written by Microsoft for php.net soon.

As always I talked to a lot of the usual suspects: Scott MacVicar, Andrei Zmievski, Derick Rethans, Sebastian Bergmann, Chris Shiflett, Cal Evans and others.

Oh, and if you are really bored, check out the latest May issue of php architect, which has a bunch of really cool articles about PHP and Windows. Some of them were even co-written by me, which gives you an idea how far php | architect has sunk to have people write articles for them

I just checked out the Website, and the May issue is not posted yet. But everybody who attended PHP|Tek got a copy of that issue in their goodies bag.

I always enjoy giving sessions and the session I did give at PHP|Tek was ‘PHP 5.3 The best PHP on Windows Yet' , and I got some really good feedback. I think I had about 40+ people in my session. People are always surprised to see Microsoft's involvement with PHP and what we have done with the community so far.

It is a talk I have given before. It starts with describing what the organization I belong to (the Microsoft Open Source Technology Center) does and how we work inside of Microsoft. After that I go into some detail about why PHP 5.3 is the best PHP on Windows.

Did you know that, for example, with PHP releases prior to 5.3, the code was build with libraries that were more than 10 years old and for which nobody really had any idea where the source code went? So it was built - linked rather - with object files that were more than 10 years old.

It makes it really hard to fix/improve stuff that you do not have the source code for

Well, pretty much all the issues of the past are now gone. I will make sure I write a blog about what truly went into PHP 5.3 for Windows soon, if the budgeting and planning process doesn't kill me before that point. In the meantime, here is a link to phpfreaks where, a few weeks ago, I posted a bunch of what we have been doing.

One really interesting thing is that there were a lot of Microsoft people at this conference, specifically from the DPE (Developer Platform Evangelism) side of Microsoft.

These are the people who are very much field and customer focused. From my conversations with them, they enjoyed the conference and were glad to get the opportunity to speak with a lot of the OS crowd. It is amazing how much we all have in common once we talk about technology.

Thanks to the people who put on the conference: of course Marco Tabini, the man behind PHP|Tek, but especially Elizabeth Naramore, who is the unsung hero that is the real driver behind keeping PHP|Tek running smoothly!

On the Road in Europe - Take 1

hjanssen — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 16:25:00 GMT

Today is Tuesday - That must mean I am in Mainz. I am on day 12 of my European trip. I was in Rome and Amsterdam last week.

In Rome I attended the Moodle conference, which was pretty cool. It was put on by Roma Tre and was one of many destinations in which Moodle held conferences this past month. I went to talk to Martin Dougiamas, Helen Foster and Petr Skoda as part of our ongoing quest to get PHP on Windows to be the best experience possible.

The deployment numbers that Martin showed in his presentation are quite impressive! I have been digging around for his presentation to give these numbers, but I can't find them. I am sure that Martin must have posted his presentation somewhere, I just have not found it yet.

But the intention was to start a working relationship with the Moodle community, and this was a great start. One of the most interesting presentations was from the Italian Airforce, who described their experiences in finding better educational tools to train their personnel, and settled on Moodle to be a large part of that. It is always interesting to have a General in the audience.

It is really amazing to see how and where Moodle is used. It is a testament to the intention of Moodle and Martin and the Moodle community that is has become so popular.

The other thing I did was meet with a lot of open source influential's/Government/CTO/Journalists etc. Microsoft Rome asked me to give a bunch of presentations and interviews, which I love to do, but it turned into a 17 hour-long gauntlet. And I just want to go on record and say that I cannot be held accountable for what I talked about the last 4 or so hours of that day. It became a little blurry at that point.

The bad thing about these trips is that I am away from home for a long period of time. The really good thing about doing these trips is that I get to meet so many people. It is really cool to see the faces and have the dialogues when I talk about what Microsoft is doing in the OS world. By far it is very positive.

But I get the biggest bang for the buck when we have discussions on what people do, and want, from the OS and from Microsoft. We have been doing more and more in the OS world, but unless we work closely with the community we have no idea if we are on the right track.

One of the questions I asked in Rome in a meeting with government officials and OS influential's was ‘what does open source mean to you?' There were many responses, and most of them followed the same line. Some of the common responses where: sharing knowledge, collaboration, personal recognition, information that is easy to get to, allocation of rights, intend to make communications possible.

Well, for the next few days I will be at the IPC in Mainz. So I will blog more tomorrow. There are a lot of things we are doing right now, so I have a lot of content

Apache Conference 2007: Day 2

hjanssen — Thu, 03 May 2007 21:01:00 GMT

Here we are, day two of the Apache Conference in Amsterdam.

I have been attending less tracks today, I seem to be ending up talking to a lot of people.

It is very enjoyable to see the reaction when I tell people that I am from Microsoft, and I work at the open source software lab at Microsoft.

So far nothing but positive reactions to me being there.

I had the pleasure of talking with, among others, Lars Eilebrecht, Roy Fielding and William Rowe. They are of course very active in the core foundation. Very enjoyable, and there seems to be synergy for future collaborations.

Okay, before I go into what all took place today, I wanted to finish up yesterday’s events. And I am going to severely reduce my long winded writing (yeah right).

Two tracks I went to that were of interest yesterday were ‘ mod_rewrite’, which finally had some more technical content in it. I would love to see more of these talks. How and when to use which mod_*.

The second one was given by Rebecca Hansen of Sun Microsystems. She talked about ‘Best practices for incorporating open source code in Commercial Production’. I did not think she spent that much time on what the subject seems to imply. Much more time was spent talking about how Open Source is now viable and you can and should switch to it because large companies are now going to provide you support and services for it; so you will be safe using it.

She also said that companies are much more willing to pay for support to get what they want instead of paying for a license and being stuck with a product.

I have to say that these comments where met with some skepticism from the audience. And the questions that followed clearly showed this.

General audience response was that they are very well aware that OSS exists because of a community, not because of a company. So without the community there is no product/service. Which made the statement that you now can switch to open source because large companies will provide you service on the community software is kind of odd. Several people I spoke with afterwards seemed to share my views of it.

I think there is a place for service orientated opportunities for companies. But they better realize that without a healthy community for the projects they are trying to provide service to there is no business opportunity. Community comes first.

Okay I will write some more about what happened today. But I ended up talking to a lot of people and did not attend all the tracks I set out to. And since it is late here on the other side of the planet, I am stopping here for today.

Till tomorrow.

Well, at least it is a little shorter this time :)

Apache Conference 2007: Part One

hjanssen — Wed, 02 May 2007 21:11:00 GMT

So here I am, Amsterdam May 2nd 2007. At the Apache Conference. (A Microsoft person at an Apache Conference, what is this world coming to??)

I am going to blog from the Conference until it is over.

So, today the conference started in earnest with all the tracks kicking off. The first day was one of technical training. But this second day is where all the sessions started.

It started all with Sander Striker President of the Apache Foundation. He described very high level what was to be expected in the next few days, and he talked about the following.

He describes describes ASF, Est. June 1999. Non profit 501(R )(3) charity

He talked about how ASF is much more about community than about code, ASF manages communities, not code.

As with most projects, Open Source or otherwise, there is a tendency of burnout. He wants to make sure people stick around at the ASF by making sure there is an environment of Healthy community through: respect, open discussion, shared views and direction.

Today there are 43 Top level Projects (6 more than last Apachecon, October Austin - 2006.). There are also 31 projects in the Incubator (compared to 38 at last Apachecon). Overall he expressed his belief in that the future is looking bright and ASF being very healthy.

Also, today there are 1500 Committers worldwide, 220 Members. Membership is about the individual. Not corporations.

He closed by saying that People have a tendency to burn out in the infrastructure portion. It is a tough job to keep doing.

Picture 1: Here is a shot of the attendance during the keynote and introductions

Being notoriously bad at guesstimating the total number of attendants at any event, I am guessing that there are about 250 to 300 people here.

A question from the audience resulted in a very interesting answer. The question was how do you become a member. The response from Sander was:

Become a Committer first, and provide good quality work. If you keep contributing you might be proposed as a member. This will be subject to a vote.

But the description of a clear path to become a member is somewhat unclear from my point of view. I would think this path is more defined for those people wanting to become way more involved.

Next up was the key note delivered by Steven Pemberton, Researcher at the Center of Math and Computer Science. His keynote was called:

Abstraction and extraction: in praise of

He talked about abstractions of programming languages. And then went into how complicated these abstractions still are today. Yet daily interaction with objects can lead us to confuse the concrete with the abstract.

One of the nice things about programming languages is that they abstract away detail, like how data structures are implemented, how procedures are called. Etc.

He described a talk by Kernigan and Ritchie that he went to in the 70s where they were talking about Unix and C. This gave me a nice flashback and I am starting to feel pretty old! Thanks!

Some of the things we are struggling with today where the result of mistakes that were made when UNIX/C came to be. He talked that in his view that UTF-8 today is the result of the way they conflated characters worth units of store.

The intention of his talk was to speak more about usability, and designing for usability.

I have taken many notes when he spoke and I am trying to compose them back into his keynote. Bear with me while I try to reconstruct my notes. :)

He stated that you shouldn't confuse usability with Learnability. They are distinct and different. What he means with that is that if you want your software to be used by a large audience, you need to make is usable. Emacs (Still my personal favorite) is a powertool, you can do great things with it. But it is not what I would call usable. (powerful? Yes, Easy to learn? Not so much.)

What are the features of websites that you go back to regularly. The thing that differentiate them from other websites with the same purpose that you don't go back to.

Forrester research found 4 reasons for this.

Good content 75%
Usability 66%
Speed 58%
Frequency of updating 54%

The rest was noise: 14% and lower.

Yet Usability is usually the first thing scrapped when web sites are built. This seems to be applied to the design of software as well.

Eric Raymond, stated that making good software requires a lot of money to make sure it is usability tested and designed. This takes a large company with a large amount of money. OSS has not solved this problem yet.

Programmers like the command line, they are much more intuitive. ("Sensories" like much more graphical design). OSS programmers are intent with their use of the interface, yet the rest of the world is not. The rest of the world is much more Sensory.

A Dutch Magazine places GIMP last in it's review because of it's poor interface.

US Department of Defense discovered 90% of cost of SW production is debugging.

For example AJAX empowered page is a lot of work, Google maps, poster child of Ajax generation is more than 200k of code. He asks if it truly have to be this hard?

He made a really funny comment, while preparing his presentation he checked to see how much processor usage was going on on his machine. Then realized that his machine had dual core. And discovered that his computer is now twice as idle as it used to be. :)

Centre of his talk was really about usability. Much more so as it relates to languages. And I will give a plug here, it is basically the same argument he made as I did in my blog a few months ago. (He probably was more elegant in describing it) A link to the blog I wrote can be found here; Languages are becoming way too easy. In there I make the argument that languages are becoming easier yet they and the operating systems they run on have not kept up. (Meaning both have a really hard time protecting the programmer from the outside world :))

Some more data he gave that I found interesting: Computers have become 40 times faster in 25 years, Programmers managed to become 2 to 3 times faster maybe over that same time period. Which is because you still need to do to many things in languages. The example he gave was source code he found to display a clock. The clock part was only a few lines of code. But the rest of the 1000+ lines were taken up by setting up the framework. Making sure redraws and sizing are handled etc etc.

I will leave it at this for now. There is a lot more to write in the next few days, and I need to start reducing my blogs, they are becoming way to long!

Stay tuned, more to come in the next few days.

OPEN/SHARED SOURCE AT Microsoft

MichaelF — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 21:25:00 GMT

It has been a while since I posted a blog, and I really have no other excuse than that I have been very busy. I have had a whole bunch of blog ideas percolating in the back of my mind, and I will be writing them down soon.

When we started port25 and the OSSL it was met with great skepticism. But there have been a lot of changes going on around us here at Microsoft. And one of those I wanted to bring to your attention.

A few years ago the mere thought of Open Source at Microsoft was ridiculed both inside and outside of the company. But I am starting to see small and sometimes not so small changes. This blog describes a very positive change.

As you might all know, I went to the 2006 OSCON conference in Portland. And there I met another Microsoft employee, Sara Ford. She works in the Visual Studio and Power Toys area. She has been a very active blogger in the past (unlike myself, working on it though!) And you can find her page here.

We got to talking at the conference and I have worked with her a little since then and found her to be a very energetic person greatly interested in OSS. But why is this interesting??? Well she attended a session at OSCON given by James Howison. (See his OSCON session info here ) And his presentation was on open source communities.

She was so impressed by it that she is currently working on Open Sourcing the Power Toys. I had the pleasure to sit in the training she gave the team, you can see more of the training she gave (unfortunately I was there as well and probably messed up the whole video by opening my mouth. So ignore me!) here.

In any case, who would ever thought Microsoft would open sourcing anything. But it is happening, and in future blogs I will give you all more insight on my first 4 or so months here and the changes I am seeing both internal and external.

Till then!

Hank.

Learning from OSCON 2006

jcannon — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 14:37:00 GMT

Preliminary stuff

Hank Janssen and myself attended the OSCON on the 27^th and 28^th of July. We did not attend the tutorials or the Executive briefing but were there two days of the two and a half days the sessions were in progress. We also attended the keynotes on both days (27^th and 28^th July).

As a strategy, Hank and I discussed the sessions and their subject matter, splitting up to attend different sessions in order to maximize coverage. In general I attended the “business” and “strategy” sessions and Hank attended the more technical sessions.

I’ll cover the sessions I attended. Hank can be responsible for his own thoughts!

This was the first OSCON I have attended, even though I have been to other conferences where there was large open source presence, so it was very exciting for me! I’ll talk about some of the sessions I attended in chronological order.

Some of the sessions I attended are not covered here, because I wasn’t impressed with them. So even in Open Source software there are some, shall we say, “imperfections”! J

The sessions are hyperlinked from the “index” below, that way you can just jump to the one you want without getting meta-carpal tunnel syndrome from blog scrolling!

First impressions

The conference was very well attended. It was clear that there were not only traditional open source “hackers” and startups (though there were many of those), but there were a number of established enterprise vendors (HP, Dell, AMD, VMWare). It also seemed that the startups were a lot more mature than Open Source startups from the past – their message was clear, but not strident.

Surprisingly, IBM pulled out from the conference at the last moment and there was nobody (visible) from IBM at the conference. Google was present and had a number of presenters, but had a booth only for recruiting. (They did announce their portal to Sourceforge at the conference).

There was a dearth of enterprise customers – all the people I met fell into the vendor, academic or Open Source organization ( Mozilla, Apache) category.

The only customer (non-software related company) with an official presence was Ticketmaster, who were recruiting for Linux admins and Open Source developers.

There was a lot of talk about Open Source as a business, a number of keynote speeches and sessions addressed this. There didn't seem to be buzz about a particular technology or company that stood out.

The conference was a good place for me to gauge which products/technologies/companies were gaining momentum and get opinions through face to face contact with both users and principals. It also was a place to make an assessment about what was going well, what was not going so well and concerns of the Open Source community.

A Closed Source Project becomes Open Source – How We Succeeded (Lars Thalmann, mySQL)

Lars Thalmann was part of a team that was acquired into MySQL from Ericsson’s Business Innovation divison. The product that they worked on was a closed source Ericsson product called “Alzato” - which was a clustered database system used mostly by stock markets and telcos.

The product was successful enough that there was a 60 person team in Ericsson developing and maintaining it. mySQL acquired the entire team along with the product and renamed the product mySQL Cluster. mySQL Cluster is open source just like mySQL’s other offerings.

Alzato was meant to be a high availability and performance database with five nines (99.999 %) availability & had a parallel architecture with replication for speed and scalability. In short, this was an advanced technology project.

The architecture was changed so that the clustered storage engine of Alzato was now accessed through mySQL and NDB in mySQL Cluster rather than through SQL and NDB as before.

Lars presented the talk as 10 “shocks” that the closed source team had to go through when they found out what was different between open source and closed source.

Some of the things he said (I will not try to transcribe his entire talk here) were of the nature - “It should be possible to install software in less than 15 minutes" since “The community consists of people with little patience. You surf, you find something, you try it – if it does not work right away you move on!”

The more I listened to Lars, the more I was convinced that open source had forced developers to adopt good practices, just by the nature of development rather than by any coercion. Microsoft also followed the same practices, at least within a large development team, but had come to those processes by painful experience!

The one thing that I learned was to make all interactions explicit - by having bug databases and forums that capture every small piece of information that might be needed. Having community coaches and documentation constantly improved by user review was another highlight.

The thing that really struck me was how strong the motivation of developers could be if they were able to directly interact with the users. Lars said - “Developers work all the time (rather than 9 to 5), being inspired by the feedback and suggestions – which makes people enthusiastic”

So, You want to Build an Open Source community: Learning from Apache, (J Aaron Farr, Member, VP Apache Excalibur)

Apache Incubator is the incubator of projects for Apache. It takes projects and project proposals for open source projects and evaluates them for suitability as Open Source Projects under the Apache umbrella.

The talk was focused on “what makes a project a good candidate to be open sourced through the Apache incubator”?

The thing that I took away from the talk was the danger signs of an Open Source project NOT being a strong project . The list that Aaron Farr presented was:

Some trying to turn an “Orphaned product” into an Open Source one
Inexperience with open source of the team doing the project
Homogenous developers – from the same company, academic institution rather than a diverse group of people from all over
Reliance on salaried developers only and not on a community that is enthusiastic about the project
Fascination with Apache brand, wanting the name, without aspiring to do the work!

An interesting comment was made by the presenter – “Java Enterprise space may be the best analogy to Microsoft OSS activity”. I am not sure I completely followed that – any reader care to comment? The other thing that stayed with me was “One of the upsides to being IN a healthy, thriving OSS project are a renewed enthusiasm for software”. They must have been talking about my job here at the Open Source Software Lab!

Lessons Learned in Taking a Closed Source Product Open (Neelan Choksi, Sr. Director, BEA Systems)

Neelan Choksi was President of Solarmetric that produced a Object Relational database mapping engine called Kodo. Kodo was closed source product, even before it was acquired by BEA.

BEA open sourced Kodo as Open JPA which include the kernel and the J2EE EJB 3 Persistence specification implementation. The decision to make the O/R mapping engine open source was taken in February 2006 and the product was released in July (it took 6 months to open source the project).

Explaining the business reasoning behind the decision, Neelan suggested that the reasons one would want to open source a product were:

Create ubiquity – large distribution of product
As seeding strategy for other products that the company hoped to make revenue from
Due to competitive / commoditization pressures. Kodo was already feeling pressure from its competitors who were open source (Hibernate) even before the merger with BEA.
The Razor / Razor blade strategy. The open source product is free but a recurring critical part that was used by the open source product was not.
Religious fervor – belief in open source “as free as in freedom” philosophy
Financial gain – cost decreases from bug fixes, development, support of product counteract any lost revenue from licenses
For marketing purposes to develop a brand based on a piece of software that can be leveraged later
Strip mining and waste dumping – dumping a product that isn’t valuable
Real world test to understand how open source works.

It was interesting to see how a company that primarily relied on closed source adopted an open source strategy. Hearing it from someone who had been through it himself was refreshing. (Rather than hearing from pundits who theorized on the topic without having the real world experience!). He also said that it was hard to get a business behind an open source strategy, because as soon there was a priority conflict the “old business” people would try to de-prioritize the open source projects.

The one takeaway that Neelan wanted us to have was that open source was not magic dust. To develop a product ,whether you have people with those titles or not, you do need Product Management, QA and (yes!) Marketing.

According to him a business is a business so the success of a product will be determined by overall execution not technical excellence or the closed/open nature of the code

Birds of a Feather Session, “Open Source in Higher Education”, Moderator – Bart Massey, Portland State University.

This was a session with significant participation from Portland State University (PSU) and Oregon State University (OSU), but with other members from as far afoot as Texas and Tennessee. Some of the people were lecturers, some faculty and some were system administrators from academic institutions.

When I asked whether they were aware of the Academic program that offered Windows source code for educational purposes – most seemed to be vaguely aware of it. One of them suggested that Microsoft write a textbook that included programs and instructions on how to use the source code. There are no such textbooks available for academic institutions to use as yet.

Another had anecdotal information of the cost of training students for IT Pro. They said they were teaching Windows because the license for setting up a lab was cheaper from Microsoft – which also had very cheap certified 'train the trainer' programs. Red Hat was almost an order of magnitude more expensive – and their train the trainer program required expensive yearly renewals. Besides, Windows admins were more readily employable in their local regions.

There was some discussion of using open source to teach academic lessons vs. developing open source itself as part of academic training. It seemed like opinions were divided as to the utility of each approach.

Bart Massey talked about the Open Source Education Lab at PSU. Among other things he runs a course (a summer long lab) on Open Source. We are talking to Bart about seeing if any of his students are interested in working at the Open Source Software Lab. Any of you readers out there interested? Drop us an e-mail!

The (Surprising) History of Copyright, and What It Means for Open Source, Karl Fogel, Google, Inc.

Karl had an interesting argument which is interesting not just because he works for Google. His contention is that copyright is not for the benefit of the creator but for the benefit of the distributor. And given that the Internet has made cheap ubiquitous distribution really easy, copyright has lost its utility.

An interesting tidbit that he mentions is that the theory of copyright was advanced to protect their interests by the Royal Stationers guild when censorship, which was implemented by printing only being allowed through the guild, was revoked by the English parliament. He takes the radical position that copyright be abolished and be replaced by some other fair mechanism that doesn’t benefit the distributors but benefits the creators. This puts even the GPL in jeopardy because the basis of the viral nature of GPL is copyright.

Even though his ideas may seem radical, the argument about the nature of distribution changing the landscape for businesses should be taken seriously. His site is at www.questioncopyright.com

Building Succesful Open Source Projects (Jorg Janke, Founder and Principal, Compiere)

Jorg Janke is a founder of Compiere – the premiere vendor of an open source ERP product. According to Jorge, Compiere has seen over 1 million downloads since 1999 and is a top 10 most downloaded product on SourceForge. They have 250+ customers and have concentrated on Product, Process and Distribution. They have 70 partners who play an important part in their ecosystem.

Jorg believes that there is no “one size fits all” open source development model. He said that as a case in point SugarCRM tried Compiere’s model but evolved to other models. He also said that Compiere has been evolving their model constantly since 2002.

He suggested that there were some myths about OSS development

Heinzelmännchen (Good Gnome/Fairy) Theory – put something defective/half-finished/unsuccessful technology out there and some “Good Gnomes” in the open source community will fix it for you!
“Sexy” application theory – according to him, with “sexy” technology, men try something 3-4 times longer before they give up! He said that free had limited sex appeal!

According to Jorg “The Basic Open Source Contract” was

I give you a gadget for free
You can use it

Provided you have skills & time.
If you need help you need to pay for it

3. I hope that in return you help by

Spreading the news
Giving feedback
Offer advice/help
Improve the product

I was impressed by Jorg’s grasp of the software landscape – he was no radical hacker developing in his garage, but a clear thinking businessman with a great grasp of the software business.

He said Compiere first and foremost was a product that solved the major pains of all ERP projects, the installation and implementation. There were no compromises in Compiere because it was open source, it all the features necessary to its users. They also had a clear strategy, Compiere made the enabling product but Compiere’s partners sold it to users.

Another thing that they had thought through was that they only supported one (and only one) version at any point in time. But they didn’t leave their customers high and dry, they had proven tools that migrated between versions which made it easy for their customers to migrate.

Business Models for Open Source Software Companies, (Tony Wasserman, Executive Director, Carnegie Mellon West Center for Open Source Investigation )

According to Tony, some users of open source s/w, especially companies, WANT to pay and EXPECT to pay for use of software. Tony is the person behind OpenBRR, about which organization I had written in my blog “What does business readiness of software really mean?”

According to him the business models that have worked for OSS are (it would take much space to explain them all but you should get a good idea from the companies mentioned). Let me know if you think there are other business models as well out there

Subscriptions - Red Hat
Cross selling (open + commercial products) - Collabnet with Subversion, Borland with Kylix and SugarCRM
Support and Training – a number of small players here
Dual license - mySQL
Hosted service built on open source – Google
Packaging model - SpikeSource , OpenLogic, The 451 group
Commercial Enhancement model – EnterpriseDB, SRA OSS
Consulting model -Gartner (Open Source Summit), IBM Global services, Accenture
Patronage model - IBM, Sun, Microsoft (yes – he put that in himself, it isn’t from me!)
Reseller model
(and suggested by yours truly, drum roll please…) Hardware embedded model –Linksys, Infoblox

An interesting tidbit about paid “volunteers” vs “pure” unpaid volunteers in Open Source was revealed by Tony who said “In the top 100 OSS projects paid volunteers FAR OUTNUMBER the pure volunteers”.

My only regret is that I couldn’t clone myself and be at multiple sessions at the same time! Wish I could have come earlier and stayed longer!

FreedomHEC trip report

admin — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 17:29:00 GMT

FreedomHEC trip report
On Friday the 26th of April I attended the FreedomHEC Un-Conference (Yeah I am late with posting it). This was a two day conference which was held on the 26th and 27th. I only attended the first day. The FreedomHEC Unconference was billed as:

The hardware unconference where you'll learn how easy it is to make your hardware compatible with free, open source operating systems such as Linux, and available to new markets such as servers, next-generation entertainment devices, and more.
Get answers on everything from kernel data structures to the fine points of licensing. Discover how participating in the Linux process is fast and simple, how the development process works, and where to get started.

It did not completely achieve this goal, but was very helpful to people who have never done device driver development for the Linux Kernel.

It was set up by Don Marti, and was attended by approximately 35 people of which 8 or so were current kernel maintainers. I think the enthusiasts outnumbered those people who would be writing company device drivers by 2 to 1.

The conference started with a suggestion session as to what people wanted to see so that a calendar could be created. As a result the first day calendar became this;

1. SYSFS OVERVIEW

2. LINUX SOCIAL ENGINEERING

3. SCSI Q AND A

4. ROCKETS

5. GETTING DRIVERS INTO THE KERNEL Q&A

Below are more details on the conference. My apologies if this at times is confusing, but I am working off my notes here...

1. SYSFS OVERVIEW

This was an overview given by Greg Kroah-Hartman, who is the current Linux PCI tree maintainer (Among others he also does sysfs, kobject, debugfs and kref code). He works for SuSE Labs at Novell.

He presented a high level walkthrough of the sysfs subsystem (the /sys area) This is only available in the 2.6 kernels and is still evolving.

Sysfs (/sys) is a RAM file system, so anything created in there by humans after boot will be lost after any subsequent boots.

-sysfs shows all of the devices (virtual and real) and their inter-connectedness

In the past /proc has been used but /proc should be used for processes and not device drivers. /proc is the older method of creating device driver configuration files.

One of the reasons that /sys exists is to standardize configurations of various device drivers. /proc has been used/misused in the past for configuration representations/files/atributes, the data under this file system are different from programmer to programmer and device to device and are very hard to interpret unless you know the format.

/sys changes all that. It provides a standard method of defining and using device driver attributes. It is based off the principle of one value per file. And this value can only be a simple value, no histograms or large binary configurations (debugfs is specifically for this purpose!). Still people seem to break these rules at times.

Do a tree under /sys to see what the structure is, and cat the files for the values.

Power management used to turn things on or off, is not fully working yet. USB is getting there for power management; the rest, not yet. Put in a USB Pen drive for example and see /sys/block change real time (/sys/block/sda). If you unplug a device, udev will take care of cleaning up. You do not have to un-mount or do anything else. (If you do that to a drive you are writing to, of course you are on your own) You can also mount things by label easily.

If a change is made to a device attribute in /sys, an event is triggered that programs like hal can get real time. General guideline, if you write a user space program/driver, tie it into hal.

Also, /dev is now a RAM file system in 2.6 (Some distro’s might not have implemented this)

If you want to add proprietary drivers, they will live in /lib/usdev/devices, this is when they are not sysfs aware. This location is persistent.

2. LINUX SOCIAL ENGINEERING

This presentation was given by Randy Dunlop, A past USB and Kernel Janitor and maintainer.

The presentation was given to give people an overview of do’s and don’ts when they start submitting code to the kernel. A lot of the information given was common sense but a lot of people do not follow the rules. (e.g Rules so Obvious that they are not followed)

The presentation was very much in Bullet form and so are my notes on this, so they might not flow as well as they could.

SOCIAL ENGINEERING

(Meritocracy) Development.

Massive amounts of open communication via email etc.

LINUX CULTURE

Community alliance is high
do what is right for Linux
Meritocracy - style, values and culture
- Ideas are good, but back it up with code.
Driven by ideals and pragmatism, bottom up dev
Not driven by marketing req.
Don't just take, give back to.
Following standards
Compatibility with other systems.
RERO release early release often. Get feedback. Bad side is flames, embarrassment.

Treat people with respect.
Continues code review and improvements.
Follow the culture
Code speaks louder than words

LINUX DEVELOPMENT VALUES

Pragmatism, not theory
Code not talk
Performance
Technical merit, not politics/who/or money

THINGS TO AVOID

Patents, binary modules
NDA
Proprietary benchmarks
making demands instead of requests
Adding more IOCTL :-)
Marketing
Design documents

WHEN NEW INFRASTRUCUTRE IS NEEDED

http://lwn.net/Articles/132579

DRIVERS FOR NEW HARDWARE

Need GPL license to add to the kernel. Or HW, with specs and approval to make resulting code GPL.

NEW DRIVER DEV

Requires >1 dedicated full time sw eng to keep up with mailing lists.
Continuous commitment
Stable Kernels are 2.even. dev cycle Kernels are 2.odd trees

COMMUNICATIONS

Best way to communicate, keep it short and constructive and use mailing lists, no need to meet.
Dev conferences.

MAILING LIST etiquette

http://vget.kernel.org/vger-lists.html for list of mailing lists.

GENERAL

Check out OSDL
User API is very stable and will remain so.
Kernel API is not stable. A static API limits innovation and adds "cruft"

In all the presentation was a crash course for people who have never done collaborative development, and tried to prepare people what is ahead and what kind of commitment will be needed to be part of the Linux kernel development.

3. SCSI Q AND A

Led by James Bottomley SCSI Subsystem maintainer.

I do not have many notes on this part because not much was said to keep notes on, a few things that I did write are as follows (Second item is of great interest)

If you want to get an idea of how SCSI drivers work, check out the 53c700 which is an excellent driver to learn from. It is older but continuously maintained.

There is kind of a new concept called a Target driver. Target drivers make it appear to the outside world as if it is a driver (A virtual driver more or less), but instead connects to the actual physical device drivers. Allowing, for example, to turn a Linux box into a RAID device. Then you can talk to the target driver as if it is one device. Not many of them out there yet, but there is one from IBM which James did not think was a very good. And there are a few on the way. There are two people (names escape me currently) that are actively developing them. In my opinion this is a pretty interesting concept that allows you to do a whole bunch of cool things. (e.g Network routers, Cheap raid devices etc)

You can (should?) write SCSI drivers in user space.

4. ROCKETS

A lighter presentation was given by two students from Portland state. They are using Open source hardware and software to build rockets. Some interesting reads can be found on that project here:

http://psas.pdx.edu

5. GETTING DRIVERS INTO THE KERNEL Q&A

This was pretty much done by Greg.

Some source code control software of choice of the Kernel Maintainers

Quilt source code for patches.
Git for main tree.
Hg

Testing Kernel code is hard, but crashme is used by the maintainers be used for (stress) testing kernel stuff.

Greg was very adamant that they take any device driver. No matter what HW it uses, as long as you or somebody else is willing to maintain it they will take it. Old/New it does not matter. Even if there is only one user for it they will take it.

That’s all folks.