We also did a bit on the marketing front. The image you should see above is one of the official conference banners that you are free to use on your website if you would like to help us to spread the word. And since we are community effort relying on sponsorship money only, we will really appreciate that.

And last but not least, we are almost ready to open the registration for visitors that will allow you to book your hotel, pay your tickets, and plan your stay in Prague. You will hear from us soon.

I have met here a lot of really interesting (and famous - in the world of Debian/GNU Linux) people. My impression is that the atmosphere was just amazing, very friendly, open, productive, …. Well, we had some discussions about various license related issues, but as long as we behave as rational people and as long as there exists a common sense I’m not worried.

The picture above shows Tom Marble of Sun and Mathias Klose of Canonical talking about how to best package various Java upstreams available on the market for Debian/GNU Linux, Ubuntu, and later I hope even for Nexenta.

I have taken a chance to present some nice OpenSolaris features like zoneadm clone smoothly integrated within Nexenta.

It’s a pitty I had no more time to spend at DebConf2007, but I’m already looking forward the DebConf2008. The videos of the presentations are becoming available one after one.

The new flash demos about pbuilder running on top ZFS powered OpenSolaris Zones (that are able to host the Debian/4.0 Etch and other Linux distros thanx to BrandZ extension) are all available at my Nexenta Pages.

The reason was that immediately after the conference, I flew to Havana, Cuba and have been traveling around the beautiful island with very friendly people and talented musicians. I love Cuba and I hate to see the current political situation there with the people suffering no matter who caused it.

I hope you will enjoy the presentation as did the people at the conference…

Show me the presentation…

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…

We (me and Garry) had also a nice and long talk with Matthias Hopf of X.org (and SuSE Germany) about X development, opensource, etc., during which I managed (with his help) to get Xgl/compiz running on my laptop and I can finally enjoy wobbling windows, 3d desktop switching, and transparent windows.

Happy to say that it took me just several apt-get install … commands on my Ubuntu. I’m impressed.

Just before flying back home, I got caught by Douglas Magoulas of campware.org who (among other things) got me thinking about this:

Now back to sessions and keynotes…

New Innovation Models, Policy making and Lobbying by Florian Mueller

Florian actually ran to the stage, gave a very fast and complicated speech, and ran away straight to the European Parliament lobbying against software patents.

The thing I was able to grasp from his keynote was that:

1. Right wing parties consider open source and free software anti business and anti american, therefore it’s very hard to get their support against software patents.
2. It is actually very complicated to get the message to the politicians, because they speak different language then we do.
3. Europe is setting the world-wide standard in how the patents should be treated, so we all have to watch out what is hapenning.

Architecting Babel by Robert Lefkowitz

Robert is actually a very skillful speaker, his keynote was funny, full of dancing and hand-waving, but I believe entirely manipulating and controversal to keep the audience amused.

He basically took the premise:

In the past, people had to speak english in order to use software, this thing is now gone thanx to localization and globalization of software.

Adapted it to:

Today, people have to speak english if they want to do programming, and participate in opensource projects like Debian.

And derived the solution to this problem, which was something like this:

We have to localize compilers, keywords in programming languages, names of variables, and code comments, in order to allow the participation of non-english speaking programmers in open source development.

I will leave up to you to decide whether this is a good idea and whether it will help increase the productivity of non-english speaking programmers.

Making the Web of Things by Simon Wardley

A smaller brother of a very interesting talk The Internet of Things given by Bruce Sterling. I must say that Simon tried to inspire himself by Bruce a lot, and you could smell it in the way he was presenting his slides, making dramatic pauses and inserting random funny interruptions.

Nevertheless, Simon knows something about hardware prototyping and machines used nowadays to produce things from real matter.

He was extending the idea of opensource and programming into the hardware world, in which you theoretically could be able to print things in 3D much the same way you are now printing in 2D (photographs, black & white). At home, right from your desk.

Music 2.0: The Coming Revolution by Colin Brumelle

Coing actually had very well prepared (in content and design) presentation, kind of summarizind the history of music industry, distribution channels, involved parties, etc. He logically derived why the existing channels don’t work for musicians, how the music industry is evil, etc.

He presented some interesting projects like Pandora and last.fm and provoked classical flames in the audience about who is right and who is not, and how the things really work, and how they should be, and are not.

Ubuntu: Improving Collaboration in the Free Software World by Mark Shuttleworth

Mark is a nice guy, I don’t know whether it is because he comes from Africa, but he can get people together.

He speaks very clearly, I would say silently, without any strong expressions and too much jumping, really worth listening and talking to this guy.

His presentation was circulating around the following points:

1. Pretty is a feature: we need to encourage more collaboration among designers and programmers, clean, consistent and nicely looking facelift is what makes people happy. Did I mention usability?
2. Consistent packaging: who cares about implementation details, what matters is whether you can apt-get install netbeans flashplayer google-earth
3. Simplified licensing: forget religion wars, create framework conveying the message, much like Creative Commons do, and forget license details and incompatibilities.
4. Pervasive presence: be everywhere, get people know what your name is, strong brand management, consistent message.
5. Pervasive support: perception matters, there is a paid support available for linux, but people do not perceive linux as being supported operating system. Improve it.
6. localization: make it easy to translate software into various languages, did I mention Rosetta.
7. getting it together: improve communication among free software projects, coordinate release schedules, planning, bugfixing.
8. be inovative: do not only copy existing features of other software applications, but invent new things, be cool.
9. support for new devices: automated driver installation, perfect packaging, integration, integration, integration, it’s all about integration, get this by default.
10. common packaging format: pretty self describing.

People coming to the booth were generally interested in knowing more about OpenSolaris, it seems that everyone know what Solaris is (quoting their words: “what Solaris was”), but they don’t know how does Solaris relate to OpenSolaris, what is our business model. In general, they were eager to get the DVDs to try them out on their laptops.

The <i boot> DVD is especially interesting because it allows you to boot all existing OpenSolaris distributions from one media, you just have to choose the right one from the GRUB boot menu. Awesome stuff.

My thanx go to all guys who helped to run the booth, from left to right: Darren Keny (JDS), Chris Beal (Kernel), Garry Pennington (Website), Patrick Finch (Communication), and Pete Dennis (Kernel). I don’t deserve to be at the picture, since I was just running around all those sessions while they took the time to answer the questions.

We had the BoF in the evening, not attended by many people, but I believe this was due to the fact that none of the BoFs at EuroOSCON has actually been attended by many people. We had a quiet and friendly talk about DTrace, SMF, Zones, and ZFS, and we all I believe have learned something new.

Now back to the sessions and keynotes…

honestly.gov by Tom Steinberg

The opening keynote from Tom Steinberg was very inspiring. He presented the mysociety.org project that creates something I would call an interface to your state’s government for human beings.

Websites like theyworkforyou.com and writetothem.com, that are part of the more than two years lasting project present a really nice and simple interface to comunicate with your local government representatives and observe their work.

You can learn on a step by step bases the organization structure of your government, you can get your message heard by your representative, and you can get the other people see what you want to say.

All the communication is archived and you can just browse it in an easy way to get the overview of what was hapenning in the past. Needles to say that as this project gets momentum in the society, the representatives are basically pressed to accept it as the official way of communication, giving you (at least theoretically) the chance to get back in control of the things.

There is a lot to be learned from this interesting project, some of the lessons given by the speaker were:

1. Government might not necessarily play to major role in democracy
2. Build good tools, don’t waste the money on training (think Usability!)

I wish we ported those to a Czech Language and adapted them for czech conditions, anyone wants to join me? The code of mysociety.org is open.

MAKE and Re-emergence of DIY Tech by Dale Dougherty

Dale’s classical piece on MAKE Magazine, a magazine for hardware (think tools like hammer and screwdriver, not motherboards or VGA or anything computer related) hackers.

Dale makes very interesting comparsion of the minds of classical software hackers and classical hardware (as in hammer-like tools) hackers. We all just want to see how things work, disassembe them, and we all want to personalize and adapt them to our needs.

I must say that we in the former comunist region know a lot about MAKE related things, because generation of our fathers did nothing else than DYI due to lack of goods. Still remember ABC, VTM, or Amaterske Radio magazines?

It’s nice to see that people are interested in this stuff again.

The Creation Engine: Second Life by Jim Purbrick

Jim introduced the Second Life project and its business model, and shared some of the interesting stats about participation in the opensource projects.

He claimed that there is a participation rate around 60% in second life, while at the same time other opensource projects, like MySQL or Linux Kernel or Wikipedia get the participation below 5%. He didn’t have any explanation for this, although I believe it has something to do with the maturity of the project.

I believe the better, more mature the project is, and the better it serves the needs of its customers or users, the less they actually contribute to it. This fact pretty much correlates with what Bram shared with me about participation rate in VIM development.

From Europe to USA: Culture’s Consequences on Open Source Communities and Bussines by MÃ¥rten Mickos

MÃ¥rten is the CEO of MySQL AB, and I wish I knew this yesterday in the evening when I was actually talking to him at the MySQL BoF.

MÃ¥rten shared his views on european vs. american culture and society when it comes to open source and business. He explained why Europe is a cool continet for opensource development, while USA is generally the only place where you can start (and do) the global IT business. The three quotes I wrote down:

1. When europeans say “not so bad”, americans would say “wow, amazing”.
2. When you do something exceptional in Europe, people are kind of jealeous, while in USA they will encourage you to “shoot for the stars”.
3. When you reward the individual in Europe, the rest of the team feels bad, since “all we do is a teamwork”, in USA the promotion of an individual feels just natural.

One of the important things MÃ¥rten mentioned was that open source as we understand it is just a means of production of software, it should not be confused with business, so he basically invalidated the question about “successfull business model around opensource”. Could be one of the reasons why MySQL AB is running a successfull business around opensource software.

Dare, Care, and Share by Tør Norretranders

An extended version of a yesterdays keynote about who we (the people) are and what motivates us to do any work. Again very well presented, kind of a show, using popular terms like sex, but very logical, inspiring, and motivating.

Seems that Tør actually wrote a book about it: The Generous Man.

The bright moment of the day was my evening conversation with Bram Moolenar, the creator of VIM about opensource, licensing, Europe, my work at SUN and his work at Google.

OpenSource 2.0 by Tim O’Reilly

The opening keynote from Tim O’Reilly was concentrating mostly on the fact that OpenSource as we used to understand it was about the source code, its licensing, and re-distribution. The issue at the moment is that there is a lot of code that is modified and not re-distributed anymore (think Google), and with services like Flickr and del.icio.us it comes to the fact that it’s not open (the system) if you can’t move it (your data in it).

Tim suggested to re-think what open means these days. He also seems to be talking a lot these days about Open Data.

Attention Please! Who We Are? by Tor Norretranders

The opening keynote from Tor Norretranders was touching the topic of what actually motivates the people to do any kind of opensource work.

His talk was very funny (something that is a must if you want to speak at OSCON), and apart from taking very fast conclusions and logical shortcuts such as: we (the developers) are doing opensource because we want to have sex, he basically questioned the Darwin’s principle of survival of the fittest, and came out with the basic principle of motivation for doing the opensource work: in order to have sex, you have to get attention of the partner, which you will get by wasting your time and resources on opensource, to show, that you’ve got enough of such resources, which in turns implies that you must be the good partner you can rely on (physically)..

Very well prepared presentation.

The Microformats: Web of Data by Brian Suda

Microformats are quite a nice example of how you don’t need any formal standard in order to get the useful work done.

Brian was talking about semantic web and how to markup existing HTML data with div and span tags containing agreed-upon CSS class attribute values, in order to give them some semantic meaning.

He has shown some real world examples of live extraction of calendaring data, vcards, and location data from the existing websites. He has also talked about the unix pipe for web, basically a mechanism in which you take an HTML of a web page and pass it through several web sites (doing kind of XSLT-like transformation) in orger to get final data in another format (extracting vcards of speakers and iCal data from conference schedule website).

The Campware Initiative: Free Software for Free Media in the Developing World by Douglas Magoulas

Douglas presented The Campware Initiative, an NGO that develops several GPL applications specially optimized for media like radio (FM and internet) and newspapers (online and printed).

They take these GPL applications and help the locals (in developing countries) to set up such media. Apart from the fact that the locals can then report news on a low-cost platform (having all software for free), this solution helps to build local technology know-how centers specialized in free software products.

He was mentioning several projects that they did in the past, like a radio stations in Serbia, Guatemalla, and Siera Leone.

Cool Tools for Geographic Applications by Schuyler Erle

Schuyler presented the API behind labs.metacarta.com, concentrating in particular on the Gutenkarte project. Gutenkarte project takes texts of classical works of literature from Project Gutenberg, analyzes them and gives you the geospatial view of where the story in the book is happening.

The rest of the sessions that I have attented, The Google Data API by Frank Mantek, An Economic interpretation of the Evolution of Open Source Software by Lorenzo Benussi, and Building Internet Applications with Mozilla XUL Runner by Benjamin Smedberg didn’t quite capture my attention. They were not very well presented, not bringing anything new to the discussion, and just not expected by me at this type of rather expensive event.

Dzongkha Linux is a Debian/GNU Linux based distribution and Live CD localized and fine tuned for Bhutaneese users.

Interesting part was that Debian, and GNU Geneal Public License gave the Bhutaneese chance to build their own operating system and advance the level of computer education in a country that is ignored by mainstream operating systems such as Windows XP from Microsoft or MacOS/X from Apple.

As Peter stated in his report:

My own keynote lecture focused on the main key aspects of Free Software, especially in developing countries (Openess, independence, ability to preserve the local culture and knowledge, ability to develop a local software and services industry). I, of course, also introduced the Debian Project, targeting the point on the commitment
of the project to Free Software and enlightning its ability to be “derived” for specifics needs.

I am personally very happy to hear that these things happen, especially with regards to the fact that I have spent some time in Nepal that is in many aspects very similar to Bhutan.

During the three days of conference, you can freely concentrate on very interesting topics being discussed there, meet your former (and possibly future) coleagues and friends, refresh your brain, and refill the batteries.

Due to a lack of time, I had only one spare day to spend there this spring, nevertheless , the topics were really mind provoking.

Updated 2006-05-28: Added missing presentation of XEN

Botnets (Bot Networks) by Helena Nikodymova from BIS

Helena started a day with an interesting talk explaining terms like bot, botnet, zombie, trojan horse, keylogger, …, and their roles in todays hacking world.

She presented some rather unusual facts (at least for me) that include:

• It is being estimated that seven percents of all computers connected to the internet are under control of hackers (zombies connected into botnets).
• These are mostly used to send SPAM, but also to generate DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks against companies that are required to pay a ransom to protect themselves. Such companies usually never admit that.
• Almost all hacking activity is coordinated to generate some kind of profit by renting botnet power.

Helena also cited several Symantec statistics from 2005 that include:

• It usually takes 5 days to develop an exploit for some known vulnerability (for which the patches are available). Yet 14 days after the patches are announced some big companies are being infected since their systems remain unpatched.
• It takes around 1 hour to get infected when connecting plain unpatched Windows XP Pro to the internet (the same applies for Windows 2003 Server).
• There is around 10000 computers being infected every day by some kind of virus.
• There is around 1400 DDoS attacks happening every day.

Rootkits by Zdenek Riha from Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University

Zdenek introduced the term rootkit and explained very well its purpose, strenghts, and weaknesses. He went into some interesting technical details on how the rootkits are implemented under Linux and Windows, what are the techniques used to detect and remove them. He talked in particular about:

• syscall_table patching in Linux, live kernel patching via /dev/kmem.
• rootkit loading via kernel module and how to hide module from listing and protect it from unloading.

The results were as usual:

• Do not use modular kernel (if only this was possible and convenient in reality).
• Never go live without Tripwire, and some kind of IDS.

Things pretty standard and well known in IT, how many admins actually do them?

He also noted that (logically) most current rootkits already use (or will use) HTTP traffic (with proper syntax) to control the machines. Such communication is virtually undetectable on the internet nowadays. Worse things to come.

Crypto HW resistance by Vaclav Lorenc from Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University

Vaclav introduced various crypto HW solutions used nowadays, from chip cards, and USB tokens, to HSMs (hardware security modules).

He presented several experiments that were done by various groups on the internet to see how difficult it is for example to dissasemble USB token, analyze its contents, detect the PIN, steel the private keys for certificates, and eventually reprogram the token and package it back so that the affected person does not recognize anything has happened.

It is always nice to see what is possible using state of art technology and appropriate know how.

Using USB tokens in real by Michal Prochazka from Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University

Michal shared with us their experience while deploying USB tokens as the primary authentication medium for users of Metacentrum GRID. He explained the resoning behind choosing the USB tokens (standards, opensource support, easy to plug everywhere, …) and steps they needed to take in order to get USB tokens working in all required software components (kerberos notwithstdanding).

LiveCDs and their usage by Michal Vyskocil from Faculty of Informatics, VUT, Brno

Michal went into a lot of technical details explaining how the live CD is implemented, what support is needed from the kernel and the bootloader, and what is the current state of affairs.

He touched topics like compressed filesystems, overlay filesystems (support writing on top of read-only media), and flash filesystems (optimized for NAND flash memories).

Finally he showed a list of live cds available on the (opensource) market, including some Linux based Live CDs, OpenSolaris based Live CDs, and some Live CDs demoing experimental features (Kororaa Xgl live CD).

Aggregation analysis in network traffic logs by Marek Kumpost from Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University

Marek had a really interesting talk about the usage of aggregation analysis to detect similar user behavior in various network related contexts. He had explained the algorithms that can be used to perform aggregation analysis and what are their weaknesses.

He is at the moment trying to detect the same user being connected from various network nodes by observing his behavior (patterns in web server visits, patterns in SSH usage, etc.).

Using aggregation analysis you can sort your users into behavioral classes and use their similarity to customize UI for them, offer them things other like or do, etc.

Amazon is actually the most well known example of aggregation analysis usage. It suggests you the books you would probably like to buy and read by comparing your behavior and shopping patterns with the other people.

Using PERL for network device administration by Stepan Bechynsky from Microsoft

Stepan first introduced the WWW::Mechanize and HTML::TokeParser modules for Perl programming language.

Later he continued by explaining how powerful these modules can be when used to batch-manage lot of cheap network devices like printers and WIFI access points that can be configured only by using usually half-broken HTTP+HTML+JavaScript web interface.

Very nice talk and creative way to solve the brokenes of cheap devices and their lack of proper SNMP support.

I am really looking forward to see how WWW::Mechanize will handle all of these AJAX based user interfaces that are just starting to pop around.

Using XEN by Michal Svamberg from University of West Bohemia

XEN is a virtual machine monitor, allowing you to run semi virtually multiple (guest) operating systems side by side on the same hardware.

Guest operating systems require slightly modified kernel (to run on top of XEN), and almost all operating systems used nowadays are available to run on top of XEN.

Microsoft Windows have been proven to run, but modifications to NT kernel are not publicaly available. You can however virtualize Linux, or Solaris, or various BSD systems without any problem.

Michal described where is XEN used on ZCU, showed us live demo of virtualization, and explained their experience with live migration of virtual systems among physical hardware machines.

Pretty impressive results of four seconds downtime while migrating a web server under heavy load are definitely an argument to go ahead with XEN.

Use Case: an opensource product

Given the fact that you probably have no money to push the masses to you using the classical marketing techniques, such as giving out CDs, T-Shirts, stickers, free beers, organizing workshops, paying people to write about you, the only thing that remains is the code, its usability, and usability of your product.

Even if you had the money and tried to push the masses, there is still your code, and your code is now open. You can not play the marketing games, you are basically naked. If you want the community to participate, you have to make it easy to participate.

Use Case: a closed source product

Now compare that to commercial software, or enterprise software, or closed source software. Few people have access to the code. Few people understand it, no people are required to actually market it.

Developers that are paid by the company to work on a closed source product will do their work no matter what the quality of the code is or what the usability is. Marketing and sales will do their job, they have the space (and competitive advantage) of manipulating the masses by not showing the code and pretending that it is actually better.

Being opensource is not easier than being closed source

It is actually worse, you are naked, and you have to be perfect body shape and honest in character if you want the people to look at you. You have to write more documentation, tutorials, FAQs and other things to actually attract people.

Being opensource is feeling better

You had to make yourself more usable in order to compete with the closed source software and you can bet your code is at the moment easier to read, easier to maintain and easier to jump in and collaborate. Your product is accessible to more people and has a higher probability of surviving in the market.

The Rules

1. Make communication transparent and decision making visible.
2. Make it easy to participate (write documentation, tutorials, FAQs).
3. Focus on website usability (easy to find things, easy to study things without installing anything, screenshots).
4. Focus on code usability (easy to download, compile, test, and debug, no dependencies).
5. Focus on product usability (iPod rule).
6. Focus on integration (Java at the desktop sucks rule).

Final Note: silently assuming that your code actually solves the right problem in the right way, not every opensource product will automatically become the best available product on the market.