OpenSolaris Developer Conference 2007
It was my great pleasure to speak at the very first OpenSolaris Developer Conference 2007 organized in Berlin, Germany by the German Unix User Group.
I would say that it was even more of a pleasure to talk about Nexenta OS here in Germany where Debian/GNU Linux has a lot of users and strong tradition.
Many thanx are going to all the people who took the courage and organized the event.
First day of the talks
Simon Phipps, the chief opensource officer of Sun opened the conference with The Zen of OpenSource keynote. He was describing the end of the consumer age and the start of the participation age, topic that is covered very nicely in the Shaping Things book written by Bruce Sterling.
He also described the different roles of people working in the opensource community, what are they interests, and how they interact.
The best statement of his presentation for me was that:
People contribute code back to the community not (only) because they are altruistic, but mainly because it is a way to minimize the costs needed to generate their own wealth from the software.
In other words, you can not afford keeping your changes to some opensource software in-house. It becomes a maintenance nightmare over time, and it is certainly better to merge them upstream as soon as possible.
Second day of the talks
Roy Fielding from the Apache Software Foundation and the OpenSolaris Governing Board opened the day with an interesting talk about the Unix Pipe for the Web concept, he described the Apache2 filters and touched the area of OpenSolaris governance.
Moinak Gosh from Indian Sustaining team presented the development of Belenix LiveCD, especially the LiveCD and LiveUSB technology, the features he needed to implement, like compression support in lofi devices, optimization of the Solaris boot process. He also mentioned the features that are still missing, like UnionFS support.
My talk about Nexenta Operating System, a merger of OpenSolaris kernel and Debian/GNU and Ubuntu Linux userland was very well accepted, and generated quite some questions and interest.
I believe that Nexenta Operating System can bring a lot of exposure to the OpenSolaris kernel, and the kernel really deserves it, if for nothing else, than because of ZFS and DTrace.
I have not been able to attend the closing presentation from the Jim Grisanzio, the community manager of OpenSolaris.
I had a lot of interesting talks with the people from the OpenSolaris community, as well as with the people from Sun. I think the event was a big success, and I just hope it will be better and will attract even more people the next year.
…And yes, I hope that we again get back to the hotel from the social event at the late morning hours…
March 2, 2007 Conferences, EN, Life at SUN, OpenSolaris, Opensource