Stormy Peters gave the keynote this morning entitled “Would you do it again for free?”. If you pay someone for a task which they used to do gratis, it can destroy their motivation such that if you take the payment away they won’t do it anymore. As someone who helps companies figure out how to pay open source developers and support open source projects Stormy has researched this issue in open source in detail. The result in short: open source developers may change the work they are doing, but many will still continue in open source software. (That’s very short, the whole talk is well worth listening to.)

Thinking about it, I am an example of Stormy’s talk. I was a full-time employee on the eXe open source project at the University of Auckland, and have since been employed by a large proprietary software company. And it is true I have contributed in only a very minor way to the eXe project since my contract with the University expired.

eXe wasn’t a project I was involved in before being hired, in fact it was just an idea at that stage. It was an exciting time creating this software project from scratch and we delivered a successful program at the end well above the requirements of the grant which funded it all. However towards the end of the project I was pretty demotivated by the way the project was going with quality being sacrificed for eye-candy and constantly having to re-argue and defend architectural decisions over and over again. So at the end of my contract I was ready to hand over to the detractors and let them have a go.

Having left I felt I shouldn’t be critical or interfering myself, so I left them to it. I was also very busy with my new job and some other stuff. It may be petty, but I feel vindicated by the way eXe 2.0 was such a huge failure. The project has been handed over again and the new maintainers have returned to the original design/code-base and have done an excellent job of restoring the quality of eXe. There’s still a lot of cruft though.

I was working on other open source code before eXe, and I’m working on getting those projects I completed into a tidy state where they are easy to download and run, and don’t totally embarrass me. Then I’ve got several ideas I want to implement and which I will also release as open source just in case they’re of use to anyone else. I’ve also got plenty of work from my employer to do on proprietary source code, some which is manager driven and some which I think will enhance our product. And though I would rather be working on free source code, I actually enjoy my current job more than things at end of eXe.

That’s probably a lot more that you ever wanted to know about eXe history, but I think it fits the research quite well.

First official day of the conference though we’ve had the two days of MiniConfs already.

Bruce Schnider’s keynote is available to listen to. I see it made Slashdot too.

The points which stood out to me were:

• security requires a tradeoff
• security-the-feeling (aka snake-oil) and security-the-reality
• in a lemon market – lack of information means the cheaper product will win,
• unless there is something that signals quality
• security-the-feeling is actually important, but needs to go along with security-the-reality.

I attended sessions on GTK+, kernel report, hardware vendors, and the consumers’ view of technology.

As an ex-Intel employee it was particularly interesting to hear Dirk Hohndel (Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist at Intel) talk on “making hardware vendors love open source”. Intel has come a long way since we worked for them.

Dirk was saying Linux has a small market share, but it isn’t insignificant: 25-28% of servers. Desktops has always been hard to measure. Gartner says it is about 0.8%, but the EeePC is accounting for 1.5% of new computer sales, so not even counting any other deployments the Linux desktop sales has just doubled.

People have been asking when there will be a version of Ghost for Linux. That’s a nice idea!

Tired, this timezone has me waking up early each morning.

Today I have been floating between the MySQL, SysAdmin and Kernel MiniConfs.

Stewart Smith shared what MySQL has in development (for 6.0 or beyond).
Listed on the wiki. The most appealing to me would be true online backups.

In the Kernel MiniConf Christoph Hellwig gave a brief demo of using a emulated hardware device on QEmu to excercise a Linux device driver. This is described as much easier than VHDL. He breezed very quickly through it all. Didn’t follow the details of the code, but he described the device driver as being “so easy a monkey could write it”. He’s promised to upload the code to http://verein.lst.de/~hch, so I’ll have a play with it later and see if I can attain code-monkey status.

Ryan Fursttalks talked on using open source for disaster recovery/backups. With a mention on how much cheaper it is than Veritas software.

Trent Loyd gave plenty of tips on diagnosing MySQL problems. The title “support procedures” had me thinking it was going to be how to fill in bug reports. I was pleasantly surprised instead.

I was very interested in Oliver Hookins’ talk on high availability and replication of a MySQL database cluster. I’m not likely to need to set up such a highly redundant system, but it was still worth learning about and a couple of tools (Heartbeat and MySQL replication) will definitely be useful.

Caught the last half of the kernel lightning talks, and the kernel developers’
panel. Linus is around, but unfortunately for us didn’t join in. I realize now I should have been prepared with a question or two on block device/filesystem ioctls: is the FIBMAP ioctl deprecated? is there a replacement available (as suggested by Ted T’so) yet?

Had an enjoyable and social dinner with the other Kiwis here.

I’m sitting up the back of the Fedora Miniconf where I have access to power and the wireless. Net has been problematic, but hopefully is much better now. We are a mixture of sysadmins, developers, integrators and students. Quite a few from Red Hat (from many different locations).

It is interesting spying on what laptops are being used. Not so many MacBooks as LCA2006. Spotted a couple of EeePCs, an OLPC XO and a N800, then there’s the Dells and Lenovos and MacBooks.

Rough notes dumped onto the wiki.

Topics covered:

• Creating RPMs — Richard Keech, Red Hat
• Migrating to Fedora Directory Service — Del Elson, Babel
• The kernel in Fedora — Dave Jones, Red Hat
• SystemTap — Eugene Teo, Red Hat
• Samba and LDAP using FDS — Del Elson, Babel
• Fedora Internationalization — Jens Petersen, Red Hat
• Provisioning RHEL and Fedora — Richard Keech, Red Hat

A key work-related factoid from Dave Jone’s talk is the on-disk structure for Ext4 is not yet locked down, but will be in the 2.6.25 kernel. 2.6.25 should be released in April. Fedora 9 will pick it up before its release in May even though this is quite late in the release cycle. I’m not sure if that means ext4 will be available in Fedora 9 as Dave said he was wanting to see the -devel designation dropped from the module first.

I’ve put up 3 more photo albums: Ngauruhoe, my flat, and Melbourne. These are some old photos I’ve found on my hard drive. I’m sure I have some more old photos I should upload too.