In short that means that you should not see the familiar vim: command not found message anymore. VIM will become part of SXCE build 78, it should be in the next SXDE that will be released spring 2008, and I hope that Project Indiana will pick it up soon.

The putback was done by one of our colleagues, Martina Tomisova from Sun Prague last Friday and we celebrated it today by eating Indian sweets.

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…

• Developers are always at the bleeding edge, they do not care about users, and the only option they recommend you most of the time is to upgrade to the new version of a product, that is better, faster, with more features, …, and of course more bugs. It is worth pointing out that the upgrade process is never as simple as typing:
  # apt-get update && apt-get -yu dist-upgrade.
• You are seeing things that were never meant to be seen again (also known as CZ: kostra ve skříni).
• You are faced with all tons of the latest-and-greatest technology (read: Java + XML + ORM + [insert your favorite enterprise standard]) that actually never simplified any work, but thanx to which you are very well paid because there are less and less people who can orient in all that mess.
• You think more and more about software usability and consider buying yourself a Mac computer.
• You end up frequently at The Daily WTF, but this time you are not laughing as you did before. The daily WTF experience became your daily bread.

Having been working as a software designer and developer since the beginning of my career, I really love the sustaining work because it is almost endlessly refreshing. See you at The Daily WTF.