OSCON 2009 – Day 2 (liveblog)

Your Work in Open Source, the Numbers
* Crawl done by google
* 30M unique files and 2.5B lines of code
* 47% of the Open Source code they crawl is GPL, 26% is LGPL
* For GPL’d code on code.google.com, about half use v2 and half use v3
* the AGPL grew about 300% in 2009, but from a very small base
* there is twice as much Open Source C code than C++

Enabling Academic Research – Open Tools and Services on Microsoft Platforms
* Build Open Source extensions to Microsoft tools to aide scientists in their research
* Projects Trident, Creative Commons plugin for Office 2007, Zenity, Node XL
* Building PhyloD as an Azure service

Cloud Computing – Why IT Matters
* There are over 60 definitions, many of which differ greatly
* It’s not just about technology, it’s a shift in concept, attitude, suitability and technology
* innovation->bespoke->products->services is commoditization – cloud is in the first phase

Apps for America
* Open Source + Open Data will = better government
* whitehouse.gov cost over $16M and recovery.gov cost over $9.5M
* the federal procurement process is arcane and complicated

Drizzle: Status, Principles, and Ecosystem
* Drizzle was announced one year ago at OSCON 2008
* Now have 6 people working on Drizzle full time
* Reducing lines of code is one of the biggest focuses. Being infrastructure aware and multi-core scalable are also important
* No contributor license agreement needed to contribute to Drizzle
* Several companies aside from Sun contribute heavily to Drizzle. Intel is a big one.

Eucalyptus: an Open Source Infrastructure for Cloud Computing
* Eucalyptus is an open-source system for implementing on-premise private and hybrid clouds using the hardware and software infrastructure that is in place, without modification. http://www.eucalyptus.com/
* public clouds are usually opaque and lock-in is a big concern
* Reimplemented the Amazon EC2 API to start. Aim is to cover all Amazon API’s including S3, EBS, etc.
* AppScale will run on Eucalyptus and is an Open Source reimplementation of Google AppEngine
* Amazon is aware of the project and has stated “no comment”

Building Custom Linux Images for Amazon EC2
* Can build images from a running system (ec2-bundle-vol, ec2-upload-bundle and ec2-register), from scratch or using a 3rd party service (such as RightScale)

Building a Highly Scalable, Open Source, Twitter Clone
* Cassandra, Dynomite, Redis, Tokyo Tyrant, Voldemort
* CouchDB, MongoDB, Solr
* BigTable, HBase, SimpleDB

Beyond the Hype: The True Costs of Open Source
* Reducing IT costs is one of the top goals of company executives
* Implementing OSS is a top priority for many as a direct result of this. “access to the source” ranked almost dead last when asked about priorities.
* In cases where TCO is 20-30% cheaper, it doesn’t really matter as companies will simply negotiate better pricing. In a case like MySQL where the TCO is 80-90% cheaper, price really matters.
* In many cases, OSS will expand a given market and not necessarily compete with existing products
* Open Source has not really penetrated the SMB market yet. As it becomes more mainstream, this will likely happen and could represent a large future growth potential.
* Many analysts reports for OSS are vastly flawed because “managers don’t ask and developers don’t tell”. Open Source may be everywhere and the managers being surveyed simply don’t know it.

What Open Source Projects Need to Know About Interacting with the Press
* Be sure to put contact information on your website. Even if you don’t have a PR firm, be sure to have a press contact.
* Reach out to journalists before you actually need coverage, even if it’s just an intro.
* When talking to a reporter or journalist, always assume you’re on the record.

That wraps up another OSCON for me. I’ll be heading to the State of the Onion Address, the Sourceforge Community Choice Awards and then heading out on the last flight out of San Jose. I once again had a great time and learned a ton. See you at OSCON next year.

–jeremy