LinuxCon: Beyond the Hype: The True Cost of Linux and Open Source (liveblog)

September 22, 2009 Leave a comment

Moderator: Matt Asay
Panel: Noah Broadwater (Sesame Workshop), David Buckholtz (Sony Pictures), Anthony Roby (Accenture)

* Open Source was the number one answer for what kind of software executives are planning to implement in the next year
* roughly 4 of every 5 programmers have used some kind of Open Source. Even for .NET programmers, the number is 3 of every 5.
* Forrester has seen multiple demonstrable million plus dollar savings via Open Source implementations, including a 100M savings by Sabre.
* Accenture: Open Source allows you to tackle problems that were previously economically just not viable.
* Sesame moved to Open Source to reduce licensing costs and allow them to compete with companies like Disney while being a non-profit. They only have two developers since moving to Open Source; they previously had 10.
* Mid-sized shops that don’t look at development as a core competency is currently a place where Open Source is perceived as weak and can improve its uptake and success rates moving forward.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Linux Foundation, Open Source Tagged with

LinuxCon: Roundtable – The Linux Kernel: Straight from the Source (liveblog)

September 21, 2009 1 Comment

I’ll be liveblogging from LinuxCon here in Portland. I have not been posting as many traditional blog posts recently, something I’d like to remedy after LinuxCon. Stay tuned.

Panel: Bottomley (moderator), Jonathan Corbet, Greg KH, Linus Torvalds, Arjan van de Ven (detained in Holland – NP), Ted T’so and Chris Wright

Opinion on what’s the most innovative recent kernel feature:
Chris – virtualization
Jon – ftrace and performance counter framework
Greg – USB 3.0 (best thing to come out of staging: a working laptop for Linus)
Ted – expanded on Jon’s performance counters answer and then added kernel mode switching
Linus: his job has gotten much easier in the last 3 months. He really likes this… (added: “Xen will have a difficult time merging their tree into mainline as-is”)

Linus: Over the last 18 years, what has been the most inspiring or motivational aspect of the Linux kernel?
* started out being all about the technology, then become more about community and even the “fame”; these days it’s “all about the Linux kernel community”. “I really enjoy arguing”
* “The Linux kernel is a life-long calling for me”
Bottomley added: “Interestingly, the average age of kernel maintainers is continuing to rise. How do we guarantee kernel development continuity long term.
* Linus: There continues to be young people getting involved.
* Greg notes that in many cases, they don’t even know the age of maintainers
* Jon: “I don’t think we’ll lack for talent”
* Ted: roughly 50-60% of people going to the kernel summit are first timers. At the very top, however, people have remained fairly constant over time
* Chris: as we add more subsystem maintainers, people are getting more niche. It takes a fairly motivated person to get involved as a maintainer.

As the rate of kernel contributions increase and as the kernel becomes higher profile, is it getting more difficult to keep out malicious code?
* Greg: We do currently track regressions
* Linus: Our issues have never been intentionally malicious, they’ve been unintentional bugs. The only worry he’s had about malicious people, he addressed in git by cryptographically signing the public repos. This was a result of someone breaking into the bitkeeper repo years ago and being caught.
Follow up by Bottomly: as we add more code more quickly, performance has been going down 1-2% a release, with a 12% degradation in the recent past. How do we address this?
* Linus: “I’d like to tell you I had a plan”. Admits there is some bloat but says part of the issue is possibly unavoidable.

question about the state of the current sound subsystem
* Linus: “The sound subsystem isn’t as bad as some people make it out to be – don’t listen to the crazies on slashdot”.
* No sound maintainers on the panel. Dave Phillips would be a good person to ask.
* Jon: “Sound is a mess in a lot of ways. A lot of flux and professionals don’t like Pulseaudio. latency is an issue.” “I do think things are starting to get better”
* Greg: A lot of new mixing boards and actually now running embedded Linux

What would you like to see in the Linux kernel, but feel may not be feasible?
* Linus: “We’ve never hit a problem that we felt was impossible to implement and generally useful”
* Ted: “Speaking with the Microsoft NTFS team at Redmond, they have actually come up with a system remarkably close to the Linux kernel development model”

Note: 2 out of 5 of the panelists read “almost every message on LKML”. Linus was not one of them (Greg KH and Jon)

Will next year be the year of the Linux desktop?
* Ted: “Next year will be the year of the Linux desktop because ‘next year’ is always the year of the Linux desktop.”

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Linux Foundation Tagged with

OSCON 2009 – Day 2 (liveblog)

July 23, 2009 1 Comment

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

Filed under OSCON

OSCON 2009 – Day 1 (liveblog)

July 22, 2009 Leave a comment

I’m trying a new format for this conference. Instead of live blogging one session per post, I’m going to aggregate the entire day into a single live post. Feedback on the format is welcome.

O’Reilly Radar
* mobile phones are now really a collection of sensors that cooperate with cloud data services.
* Google will be able to do speech recognition better than anyone else, because they know what people are searching for, and therefore more likely to say,
* As we rely more and more on data stores that live in the cloud, we need to be concerned with whether that information should be centralized or federated.
* We’ve moved to a vending machine government
* http://www.opensourceforamerica.org/

Dirk Hohndel on netbooks
* Linux on netbooks need to be:
fast – specifically when booting
graphical – move part of graphics subsystem into the kernel, clutter, Intel gem, non-root X
connected – all connectivity between different devices needs to be cohesive

Btrfs
* pronounced: Butter-eff-ess
* Designed to provide big new features not available in other Linux file systems; snapshots, fault tolerance and simple administration were high on the list
* Performance was not, and is not, the number one goal
* Some features
– Multiple devices per filesystem; shared pooled storage
– checksums; trust nothing
– snapshots; quick, cheap and writable
– directories are indexed for speed; indexed for two different cases
– small files are packed, as resierfs did

Virtualize vs Containerize
* Virtualization is great for system consolidation and protection, but you pay a heavy performance penalty
* Most popular containerization solution is OpenVZ.
* Are limited to running hosts/guests with the same kernel with containerization
* The two seem to be converging as they both evolve

Cobbler and Puppet
* Automating System Builds and Maintenance
* Always remember, “temporary solutions become permanent”
* Cobbler is basically a front end to kickstart (and therefore somewhat RHT-specific) with some additional functionality – https://fedorahosted.org/cobbler/
* Puppet is a declarative language for expressing system configuration, a client and server for distributing it and a library for realizing the configuration. It’s written in ruby. http://reductivelabs.com/products/puppet/

Ten Usability Epiphanies for Your Open Source Web-app
* Hot mouseover (affordance), using a button (for primary action) vs. link (for secondary action), use loading spinners, ensure drag & drop functionality is explicit, avoid iconitis, avoid too many steps (especially for common tasks), choose your choices (follow HIG when possible), language (be descriptive, succinct, necessary and edifying), implement undo functionality and implement keyboard-based functionality (including keybord shortcuts).

Linux Filesystem Performance for Databases
* ext2, ext3, jfs, xfs, reiserfs and attempted ext4
* single disk, raid 0, raid 1, raid 5 and raid 10
* did NO filesystem tuning at all, no mount options and all used all OS system defaults
* adding a second disk to raid 0 gets you almost no performance gain, but > 2 disks does
* raid 5 performs better than most people think
* software raid often performed better from an i/o throughput perspective, but at the cost of added CPU usage
* LVM overhead is not quite as bad as many people think
* turning off atime wasn’t as big of a win as expected

Hacking the Open Government
* There is currently a renaissance in available data and content from the federal government as well as some state governments. Everyday it seems that some new web site or service makes publicly available over the internet what previously was only accessible on paper or other non-digital format. What does this mean for the hacker, the agitator, the political scientist, and the average internet user? How do we ensure that

1. the data is in a usable form and
2. that it is put to good use and
3. that citizens are continually empowered to raise the bar a little higher?

* Some sites for those interested: http://maplight.org/ http://sunlightlabs.com/ http://www.geek-pac.org/ http://www.opensourceforamerica.org/

The first full day of OSCON was once again highly interesting and engaging. Off to the Expo Hall Reception and LinuxFund party. I’ll be live blogging tomorrow as well; stay tuned.

–jeremy

Filed under OSCON

OSCON 2009

July 21, 2009 Leave a comment

I got to San Jose just in time to attend Ignite OSCON and the Google O’Reilly Open Source Awards. I’ll be live blogging some of the sessions over the next couple days and look forward to another great OSCON. If you’re in town and would like to connect, drop me a line.

–jeremy

Filed under OSCON

Introducing the Google Chrome OS

July 8, 2009 Leave a comment

After years of speculation, Google has officially announced its intentions for a “Google OS”. From the press release:

It’s been an exciting nine months since we launched the Google Chrome browser. Already, over 30 million people use it regularly. We designed Google Chrome for people who live on the web — searching for information, checking email, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends. However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we’re announcing a new project that’s a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It’s our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

It basically sounds as though Chrome OS will be a very light weight Linux that can boot extremely quickly and is designed to run the Chrome browser quickly and efficiently. The details beyond that are unfortunately extremely light at this point. It’s a bit ironic that Chrome OS is based on Linux while Linux support in Chrome has considerably lagged Windows and OS X support thus far. My initial thought was, why Chrome OS in addition to Android. They touch on that in the press release:

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google.

It seems to me there will be quite a bit of overlap, but we’ll have to see what direction Google takes both Chrome OS and Android before we can tell for sure. You have to assume that much of the Chrome OS experience will actually take place in the cloud, which could get interesting but poses a variety of stumbling points, of which privacy and security will be major ones. Another pain point is what the experience will be like when you go offline (which happens quite a bit, despite what some people attempt to tell you). Keep in mind that Chrome OS isn’t scheduled to launch for almost a full year. A lot can happen in that time, but this announcement should be seen as a bright spot for Linux in general. Google could have chosen anything to build this on top off. The fact that they continually build products on top of Open Source software should be seen as a testament to the quality of that software. Whether Google will be able to bring Linux to the masses where others have failed remains to be seen, but between Chrome OS and Android they’re certainly trying. Privacy issues (which far too many people ignore) aside, Chrome OS + Gears + HTML5 + Wave + whatever technology drops in the next 12 months certainly has the potential to be an extremely compelling combo. It’s certainly something I’ll be keeping my eye on.

–jeremy

Additional reading:

WSJ
TechDirt
NYT
TechCrunch
RedMonk

Filed under Android, Google, Linux, Open Source

LinuxQuestions.org Turns 9

June 25, 2009 1 Comment

It was nine years ago today that I made my very first post at LQ. 3,578,611 posts and 407,152 members (note: we prune inactive members – more than 480,000 members have signed up) later, I continue to be astounded by what LQ has become. As I’ve stated many times, the site has grown well beyond my initial expectations. If you’d have told me in 2000 that I’d be traveling around the world, from London to San Francisco, evangelizing Linux and Open Source on behalf of LQ… well, let’s just say I wouldn’t have believed you. I started LQ as a way to give something back to a community that I felt had given to me. I wanted LQ to be a place that was friendly and welcoming to those who were new to Open Source and Linux. Despite our ever growing size, I think we’ve maintained that objective. With an absolutely great group of members and the best mod team on the net, we’ve only just begun however. From the very beginning, LQ has thrived on member feedback. That will never change. Visit this LQ thread to let us know how you think we’re doing. We want to know what we’re doing well and where we can improve. We really do listen closely to feedback and many of the improvements we’ve made over the years were direct responses to member suggestions. I’d like to once again thank each and every LQ member. It really is the members that make the site what it is. Here’s to another nine years!

–jeremy

Random stat: In our ninth year on the net, well over 25,000,000 unique visitors came to LQ.

Filed under Linux, LinuxQuestions.org, Open Source

Red Hat: Bad economy is good for Open Source

June 25, 2009 1 Comment

From a post by Matt Asay:

Well, on Wednesday Red Hat announced fiscal first-quarter revenue of $174 million, up 11 percent from the prior year. Subscription revenue was up 14 percent year over year to $148.8 million. The company’s total deferred revenue balance is now $567.3 million, an increase of 15 percent on a year-over-year basis. Net income for the quarter was $18.5 million.

Both Oracle and Red Hat are doing well, and Oracle is obviously dealing with much bigger wads of money, but it seems clear that Red Hat’s open-source model is the big winner in the recession.

In fact, on Red Hat’s earnings call, Chief Executive Jim Whitehurst indicated: “Budgets remain tight and we don’t see an end in sight for this. In relative terms, this is pretty good for us.” He went on to call out the big differentiator for Red Hat’s business: certified ecosystem.

The key differentiator for us in Linux is our certified ecosystem. Even those that are clones of RHEL [Red Hat Enterprise Linux] lack this certified ecosystem. The second differentiator is value: great service and support at a compelling price.

We have a very disciplined business model which is based on commoditizing key parts of core infrastructure. We’ve been laser-focused on this. Open source is particularly good at that. We’d certainly like to work with other open-source companies but they have fundamentally different business models than we have.

Repeatedly asked on the earnings call about competition from Oracle, Red Hat executives took turns dismissing Oracle’s Solaris (“When customers decide to jump from Solaris they go straight to Linux, skipping OpenSolaris”) and Oracle’s Linux strategy (“We’ve yet to lose a major customer over the last year to Oracle’s Linux offering. The only one to leave Red Hat in the past couple of years is Oracle itself.”).

You can view the full RHT quarterly report here. Red Hat continues to do well and I think it’s become clear that the continuing recession can benefit certain Open Source business models. Matt makes a very good point in his post though. At some point, the UNIX-replacement business is going to slow. Currently that business is a huge chunk of Red Hat sales. When that slowing finally happens, Red Hat is going to have to look to others places for growth and competing more directly with Microsoft seems like one clear place to look for that growth. Today, less of Red Hat’s sales come at Microsoft’s expense than many people realize. It may very well take an acquisition or two for that to change. With JBoss now fully consumed, some additional acquisitions seem inevitable, but they may not come for a little while for a couple reasons. First, most companies are trying to conserve cash right now, and Red Hat is no exception there. Secondly though, Red Hat really has to be careful whose toes it steps on with its acquisitions. They learned that lesson the hard way with JBoss. That being said, at some point they may end up being too conservative in this regard. Competing with much larger companies means you have to use your small size to your advantage and take risks. I think Red Hat is up to the task, it may just take a little time to find the value and situation they’re looking for.

Disclosure: Earlier this year I held a moderate position in NYSE:RHT. I no longer hold that position.

–jeremy

Filed under Linux, Open Source, Oracle, Red Hat

Win a Gratis OSCON Pass from LQ

June 24, 2009 Leave a comment

I’m happy to announce that we’re able to give one full “Sessions Only” pass to OSCON away absolutely free. For those of you who’ve never attended OSCON, it’s always a great event. While the event is in San Jose and not Portland this year, I still expect a top notch showing from O’Reilly. At almost $1,500 the “Sessions Only” pass will get you into everything except for the tutorials. Visit this LQ thread for more information on how to be eligible for the free pass. I’d like to thank O’Reilly for making this possible. See you in San Jose.

–jeremy

Filed under LinuxQuestions.org, Open Source, OSCON

Intel to Acquire Wind River Systems

June 4, 2009 Leave a comment

From the official press release (via AndriodGuys):

Intel Corporation has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Wind River Systems Inc, under which Intel will acquire all outstanding Wind River common stock for $11.50 per share in cash, or approximately $884 million in the aggregate. Wind River is a leading software vendor in embedded devices, and will become part of Intel’s strategy to grow its processor and software presence outside the traditional PC and server market segments into embedded systems and mobile handheld devices. Wind River will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Intel and continue with its current business model of supplying leading-edge products and services to its customers worldwide.

“This acquisition will bring us complementary, market-leading software assets and an incredibly talented group of people to help us continue to grow our embedded systems and mobile device capabilities,” said Renee James, Intel vice president and general manager of the company’s Software and Services Group. “Wind River has thousands of customers in a wide range of markets, and now both companies will be better positioned to meet growth opportunities in these areas.”

Wind River and its Wind River Linux are quite popular in the embedded space, so this could be a big win for both Linux and Open Source. With embedded devices gaining in popularity, this could be the beginning of the end for the “Wintel” duopoly.

Further reading:
SAI
ZDnet
Engadget

–jeremy

Filed under Android, Intel, Open Source

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