Why can't we All Just Get Along? Microsoft, Sun, Linux reps discuss potential for interoperability

Roundtable Discussion: Why Can't We All Just Get Along (View Summary)
Jim Zemlin, Executive Director, Linux Foundation
Ian Murdock, Vice President of Developer and Community, Sun Microsystems
Sam Ramji, Sr. Director, Platform Strategy, Microsoft Corporation


Microsoft: What would you have done differently? Sam Ramji: I would have on Day #1 built a relationship with the Legal team. Engineers adapt quickly but Lawyers tend to take a little longer to be educated on the trends and directions and to understand the ramifications. The exact quote might have been: "Engineers iterate and get to the right solution, Lawyers mitigate risk..."

Sun: Open Solaris work from Ian - he entered a little naively due to the inherent inertia when working with a large company. While building up a consensus finally happened, it took much longer than expected. Once the inertia is moving in the right direction, it is much easier to get things done.

Jim to Sam: It is clear that MS sees the computing landscape changing. Is there anything that you'd like to see from this crowd, beyond just going away and leaving us to have the dominant market share?

Sam: View Sam as the "unelected rep within Microsoft" to help work to advocate for changes in behavior within Microsoft. Have built up Linux on top of Hyper-V as well as Windows on top of Xen within MS. Hopefully the Linux community can provide positive reinforcement for the things done well and not just kick the MS for the things done wrong.

Jim: Why does MS care about the open source community? There is often an assumption that MS has a nefarious purpose behind their actions and the open source community is trying to figure it out.

Sam: Two answer: First, he'd like to see computing just get better. Sam sees that greater efficiency in computing drives greater productivity within the economy.

$60 billion in revenue - what is the next engine for growth? The better MS works with other products the greater the growth potential for MS products. A lack of interoperability will likely be an inhibitor to revenue growth.

Jim to Ian (via Twitter): Who is the largest contributor to open source in the world: Ian: Sun! The entire company is built around open source, literally. Working with other companies to ensure that their products interoperate. Jim: What is Sun going to do with mySQL? In Cloud computing or Web 2.0 companies, whatever you want to call them, open source is a major underlying technology which is a place where mySQL fits in nicely.

One example of agreement between Linux, Sun and MS is on accessibility standards for people with disabilities. Standardization in this space is a place where we could all work together.

Ian: Sun did not foresee the rise of Linux and did not get the chance to incorporate it into their strategy until too late. (Contrast this with Oracle's insight as viewed in an earlier posting with hindsight).

Jim: is there any possibility of ZFS and dtrace under a GPLv2 license? Ian (after some hesitation) "There is a possibility, yes."

Unfortunately I didn't catch all of the debate in this session because the dynamic was very interesting. The fact that this panel exists is a good sign that there may be some collaboration among some more extreme competitors. Of course, this is a major aspect of this part of the industry in which many competitors seek to find common ground for collaboration, advancing their common interests.

All in all, kudos to Ian, Sam and Jim for setting this up and running with it.

LF Collab Summit: Linux in the Enterprise: The Journey, Milestones and What's Ahead

Edward Screven, Chief Corporate Architect, Oracle

Date: Wednesday, April 8th
Time: 15:15 - 16:15
Location: Imperial
Summary: Linux has come a long way from its modest roots in the early 1990s to now being the operating system of choice for data center deployments. Join Oracle's Chief Corporate Architect, Edward Screven, as he discusses the importance of Linux in the industry, and how Oracle views and supports Linux. Edward will also highlight his thoughts on advancements needed and being made in Linux that will continue to keep it on the top.

Why Does Oracle Care About Linux?

Oracle wanted customers to try to standardize on shared pools of low-cost servers and storage as a way to save money on hardware, break down the existing Silos within the data center, and simplify the growing heterogeneity of Data Centers. Windows was not a realistic option, BSD was considered but Linux appeared to have a better chance, although in hindsight, this relatively pivotal decision was as much luck as it was a good choice.

In 2002, Larry Ellison said "We will run our whole business on Linux". Today that statement is true.

Chuck Rozwat said "We will run our base development on Linux for all of our products" Today they do.

Oracle Enterprise Linux is primarily a support business exactly tracking Red Hat Linux.

$954 million in 2006 to 1.2 billion in 2007 (Gartner) makes Linux servers the fastest growing OS sub segment, growing 25.6% over that time period.

Oracle claims that they may be the world's largest user of Linux, including their Traditional IT, Development, Oracle On Demand, and Oracle University. 84,000 servers, 10 PB storage, all running Linux. 1000 dual CPU machines in "The Farm" - their test grid. 75% running Linux, 2000 jobs run simultaneously.

What helps linux succed in the data center?

- Cost effective - total cost and marginal cost

- Standards Based, extensible, 3rd party support, open

- Enterprise Ready - scalable, reliable, manageable (at the individual box level)

- Tested configuration ready to deploy

- Enterprise-Class Integrated Support

Oracle strongly believe that Virtualizatoin Changes the Game - turns pools of servers into a fungible resource. Oracle VM is a product in this space, based on Xen, supports Linux & Windows.

Used in Oracle University, 1/6th the hardware, CPU utilization increased from 7% to 73%, Servers to administrator ratio increased 10X, Revenue per server increased 5X.

In Oracle on Demand, every customer required at least 6 machines, test, development, multiple tiers for database and servers, etc. With virtualization cuts that number down to half that or better.

Next step: Make Linux into the Standard OS for the Data Center. He believes Windows will always be the default desktop OS, but the standard Enterprise/Data Center OS should be Linux.

Endorses the btrfs file system

- General purpose file system

- Handle large storage

- designed for repair and reliability

- copy on write with efficient snapshotting and checksumming

- Manage multiple devices under the file system in raid striped and mirroed configuration

- http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org

- In kernel 2.6.29

Comments on SystemTap as not being open from the very beginning which has led us to where we are today.

The Opportunity for Linux in a New Economy

Al Gillen is back for the second year at the Collaboration Summit.

Outline:

Economic Impact
Trends from past recessions and how that applies today
The role of virtualization software
Outlook for the Linux ecosystem
Essential Guidance

There is a slowdown in IT spend - a Capital Expense (capex) reduction is mandatory for many customers, work in North America, second is Western Europe, less in Asia Pacific, at least for now. Nonpaid solutions are likely to be hot: Linux, open source DBMS, middleware, tools. Watch for update on non-paid virtualization solutions.
ROI Window compressed dramatically, paybacks not realized this fiscal year are nonstarters. Difficult to justify new initiatives today.
New migratoin initiatives are unlikely. If a migration was not already underway, it is unlikely to start now. Existing skills will determine whaat is and is not done.
Everybody wants to declare victory in a down market.

In a down economy, everyone is loosing money. No business does well, but we look more at what dynamics will change as a result of the current downturn over the next three years.

A chart on x86 server shipments shows a marked drop in Q4 2008 and is projected to return to current previous highs around the end of 2010.

Roughly a drop from 8+ million servers a year to about 7 million x86 servers a year.

It appears that the software spend trend matches the hardware trend, although the software trend remained positive (ranging from a high of 14% growth per year to a low of about 2% growth per year) with a projected high of about 7% growth per year by 2013.

Legacy of the 2001-2002 recession: That was the original demarcation line for the acceptance of Linux in the market place. Customers also began to buy major new servers for Linux deployments around that time. This also drove the build for the software on Linux. About that time CIO's claimed that there was no Linux in their data center while people in the trenches pointed out that they were using Linux at the fringes and the grass roots entrenchment had begun in earnest. That also drove the beginnings of the standardization around Linux. Linux was just then available on a number of diverse hardware platforms, driving a level of commonality in application availability - especially open source applications such as Apache, across the Enterprise.

Virtually all of the paid market for Linux is in the Enterprise space today. Some geographies are focusing on the non-paid distros.

After the recession, there was a strong growth period for several years but also that recession drove a strong push towards virtualization and consolidation.

"Free" servers became widely available thanks to virtualization software. Unix is increasingly under siege from Linux... and Windows.

Cloud might get a boost but revenue from cloud Linux might not.

Windows, of course, does not go away. Nor does Microsoft cease to be a fierce competitor.

Tranitions eventually mandate rationalization and assimilation - Managing nonpaid OSes, Managing hypervisors and guest OSes.

Virtualization as a Solution

Lifecycles for OSes and apps will be extended. Solutions that foster cost avoidance will be favored. OSes that were in use will probably stay in operation much longer than they have historically. For instance, RHEL4 apps and environments may remain in the data center for more than the typical 10-15 years and more like "as long as the application has value" - which could be over 20 years in some cases.

Solutions that cost $0 will be tested and adopted. The initiatives will result in permanent changes to how IT does business.

The Virtualization Effect: We see a decoupling of hardware and software, via virtualization. Virtualization takes two basic forms: independent guests ("stand alone" OS) - associated with nonpaid copies, less c; affinity with less critical workloads.
Replica guests ("child" copies) - Associated with enterprise distros, more critical workloads, virtualization rates higher with enterprise subscription. The rate of virtual systems to physical systems is likely to increase to 2-1 in the datacenter in the next 18 months - where it was 1-1 up until about three (?) years ago.

Where does virtualization go next?

Pricing has been driven to $0
Value add moves to management
Integration with hardware, OS
Uniguest installations
Heterogeneous hypervisor management
Managing offline images critical

Al predicts that it might take 3-5 years for KVM to work its way into datacenters as a primary virtualization platform. What this means to Xen is unclear but probably does not impact most enterprises much over the next 3 years and they will have time to devise a migration strategy.

Linux and Cloud Computing

Infrastructure Cloud - services such as CPU, networking and stroage; often presented as a virtual machine over the Web; user installs and manages their own OS and applications; pay by the megabyte, gigabits, MIPS, etc.; Examples: Amazon EC2.

Platform Clouds: An operating system and possibly infrastructure softare; hosted in a web-Accessible location; may proivde apploication developre and runtime envrionement: Example Any Web hosting provider

Applicatoin clouds: Virtualize and entire application (aka SaaS) Consumed as a solution or indvidual services through APIs. Examples: Salesforce.com, Google

Linux has already had a big play in all of these areas.

Outlook for the Linux ecosystem

Chart showing Linux distro sales from Red Hat and Novell - both showed positive growth without much impact up to Q4 2008 share numbers. Interestingly Red Hat was closer to $140 million in licenses where Novell was closer to $20 (from memory) - but Novell's growth was less impacted than Red Hat's, and both had nearly negligble impacts from the economy thus far.

Still forecasting a 15.7% CAGR for Linux, with a shift in what markets moving up the stack are growing. The distro itself is a tiny portion of the overall spend, hardare is third smallest, with App development and application software being the two areas that grow the post, with Services being perhaps the second largest area of growth (I can't see the exact numbers but the slides should be published on the LF web site).

Al pointed out in one of the graphs that a smaller market share easily mangifies a CAGR - so comparing Windows CAGR on a larger market with a larger CAGR for Linux in a smaller market does not mean that Linux has taken over Windows. At least not yet. ;)

In key workloads, Collaboriative, Application Development, IT Infrastructure, Web infrastructure, decision support are called out in some detail and their corresponding growth rates (worth reading the chart).

Drivers for Linux:
Capex concerns, virtualizatoin -
guest acquisition costs, ease of deployment, Non-paid Linux, larger ecosystem is good, open source layered SW
Increasing integration
software appliances
- new form factors
- new GTM sscenarios

Challenges for Linux
- Capturing new customers - particularly in a down economy, freeing up resources, staff training
- Non-paid Linux and OSS - generates on revenue, dries up survival funding
- Microsoft - Windows solutions, applications
- Generating revenue from Cloud

Essential Guidance
- Look at the current economic downturn as opportunity
- user virtualization as an integration point for commercial and nonpaid Linux
- Remember that revenue is not hte only metric that matters
- However, revenue is important
- Missed a bullet or two, sigh. My fingers are tired. ;)

Question from Matt Domsch: Is there a distinction between Public and Private clouds? Al: Yes. There are places for internal clouds and probably a hybrid between the two at many customers.

What about the guests in virtualization. Is there any preference for Linux or Windows? Al: Currently there is a larger set of Windows installations often driven by software applications. Aging Linux apps are often infrastructure related and it is often easier to replace infrastructure servers than to replace custom Windows apps in the Enterprise.

Linux rate may be similar to the windows rate in the next 6-8 years.

How do you measure paid vs non-paid Linux? It seems to some that there are more non-paid installations than the 50-50 split on the charts might indicate. Al: Based on world-wide surveys, returns say somewhere from 35-55% are non-paid. That number probably reflects Corporate users. There are a fixed number of servers out there so that number is used as a way to validate the response to some level.

A comment from the audience suggested that there might be a business tradeoff to consider on non-paid OSes - if you are paying for a kernel engineer or administrator to support the non-paid OS have you really saved money by using a non-paid OS?

Jim Zemlin wound up the session with the observation that non-paid Linux is obviously a key question. But it is worth noting that if you use a non-paid OS you won't be going to jail, unlike using some other OSes without paying.

Linux Foundation: Panel: Measuring Community Contributions

Luckily I found a power outlet, so here comes more blog fodder!

Panel: Measuring Community Contributions (View Summary)
Joe Brockmeier, Community Manager, OpenSUSE

Panelists:
Jono Bacon, Community Manager, Ubuntu
James Bottomley, Linux SCSI Subsystem Maintainer
Dan Frye, VP, Open Systems Development, IBM
Karsten Wade, Fedora Project, Red Hat

Joe asked each of the panelists to introduce themselves - Karsten as a gardener, Jono a member of a metal band (did I hear that right), Dan Frye - VP of Linux Development at IBM, and James Bottomley - now at Novell and still SCSI subsystem maintainer and Chair of the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board.

James: Contributions to the upstream kernel is a major source of community contributions. Karsten points out that users bear the brunt of the poor contributions. Jono points out that there are key contributions beyond just code. As an example, ten years ago the documentation project required that you know LaTeX. Today, contributions such as documentation, translation etc. are valid contributions. Joe asks what about companies that contribute market or legal review - general agreement that that is a useful contribution. Dan Frye points out that it was best said by <insert name here> in the Halloween note: People scratch their own itch. A real community allows people to contribute as benefits the contributor, as opposed to only contributing from a laundry list of features needed by the recipient. This is key to the success of a real community.

If your itch involves contributing in the Peer to Patent project, that adds value to you and thus to the community that you are a part of. James points out that code contributions are critical but so are testing, debugging, bug fixes, etc. And, the community accepts money (via the Linux Foundation) to support various Linux related activities, such as the Linux Kernel Summit or requested capabilities.

Dan: I don't see any reason to "grade" people's contributions. But we do need to remain inclusive allowing people to contribute in ways that helps to scratch their own itch. There's no need to guilt people into contributing in ways that they don't happen to find worthwhile. However, it is key to make sure that the community remains open to people so that they can scratch their own itch, to be a part of the community and to grow within the community.

Jono points that we are all still learning about the different ways that people can contribute. For instance, some people are predisposed towards certain strengths, such as python programmers or documentation writers or graphics artists. From a distro perspective, the knowledge of how new members could contribute based on their skills is a new and emerging competency.

How much thought goes into a vendor's training and education about how to make community contributions. Tongue in cheek from Joe: IBM plans everything, right? Dan laughs - we try. IBM does evaluates a new community, understanding what roles we might be able to take on, learned about styles, governance models, and try very hard to learn how to be real and effective members of the community. James points out that we also learn by mistakes. Dan points out that there isn't a mistake that IBM hasn't made.

James points out that IBM long ago attempted to make contributions in whole cloth quite unsuccessfully. IBM then went out to break down the contribution into small components which benefited the community and over time achieved IBM's own ends. Dan agreed that was a lesson IBM had to learn many times.

Karsten's perspective was that he was impressed with IBM's due diligence. His feeling is that Red Hat's approach has been more evolutionary in terms of interacting with communities and probably less formalized. James pointed out that this is a key different between an industrialized approach of "I pay you for X feature" versus the community approach were people get together to share goals and possible solutions and work collaboratively to create a solution.

James points out that the panel has collectively a lot of experience in training an organization to engage with open source and is hoping that this knowledge can be transitioned to new folks and hopefully in part to the Linux Foundation.

Andy Wilson from Intel points out that development seems to be US centric. Dan points out that IBM has a large number of contributors in India, Brasil, some in China. Joe asks for clarification - are these people at large in these countries or are they IBM employees? Dan says these are IBM employees. Andy agrees that IBM has a supportive corporate culture here, but suggests that the problem is more endemic to the Linux community as a whole. James points out that IBM's involvement has helped generate a lot more interest in developers in India becoming more interested in Linux. Dan also agreed that we are (as a community) short on contributors from eastern Europe and other countries as well as a number of other major developing countries - not just Asia.

James points out that there is also an infrastructure problem in these countries which has to be addressed as one of the key inhibitors to the growth of Linux developers in those countries.

A member of the audience asked what objective measures are actually being used - based on the title of this panel. Karsten points out there there are some objective measure such as mailing list traffic and analyzes the source of key contributors (similar to Greg KH's analysis of kernel contributors). The goal is to be able to help track the health of any community. Another measure might be IRC traffic on a project channel. James points out the work of the Greg KH and Jonathan on the git logs of the kernel to permanently track all contributions. Karten points out that community is primarily based on communication. There are some collaboration techniques such as bug work flow that provide indicators of community contribution or community vitality.

A woman from Google asked if there was a measure of success of mentoring and how mentoring improved or led to the viability of a community. James pointed out that they do some of this for the Linux kernel via the Linux kernel summit. Dan pointed out that companies don't measure code contributions as much sa effectiveness. In IBM's view, if participation in a community led to other people contributing code to address IBM's customer needs. That, in fact, was more important than measure patches which may have no bearing on value. James pointed out that no real kernel maintainer appears to have a manager which measures based on that level of effectiveness. Jono points out that measuring for the point of measuring is of course pointless. James pointed out that many people are motivated simply to get a patch into the kernel.

And with that, the time expired. Jim Zemlin wrapped up the session by pointing out that the Linux community is an excellent example of the success of a development community. And, introduced Al Gillen from IDC who will provide some measures of the success of Linux in the market place.

Kernel Developer Round Table at LF Collab Summit

Panel: The Linux Kernel: What's Next
Moderator: Jonathan Corbet, Editor at LWN.net

Panelists:
Greg Kroah-Hartman, USB & PCI Subsystem Maintainer
Andrew Morton, Lead Kernel Developer & -mm tree Maintainer
Keith Packard, X.org Project Lead
Ted Ts'o, Chief Technology Officer, Linux Foundation

2.6.30 merge window just closed. Linux noted that about a third
of the code that went in was "crap". A lot of code went into the
staging tree. So, for Greg KH, what is the staging tree really
for?

Greg KH: the staging tree came out of the driver project which
provides a collection point for random drivers, including bad
API usage, bad code, rather crappy code. GregKH is now the
"crap" maintainer, er, ah, staging tree maintainer. So, about
130 drivers were merged into the staging tree, all experimental
code, mostly from drivers that have been out of kernel since
the 2.0 days. Slowly that code is getting cleaned up now that
it is consolidated and being evolved to the point where it can
be merged into mainline.

Some distributed filesystem work, aka Ceph, went in through the
staging tree: Why? GregKH: because the maintainer asked that
it go in through there.

For Keith: what are the current graphics things that Keith is
working on. Drivers used to be done all in user mode but have been
re-educated or have come to the awareness that a number of changes
really need to be in the kernel to support graphics. A number of
new APIs for accelleration, video mode configuration, and memory
management code is now in the kernel and can be used by the X11
graphics drivers. Or rather, the X11 graphics drivers provide just
one of many graphics drivers based on the in-kernel support. This
makes the graphics capabilities more accessible to graphics driver
writers. There are still some problems in the 2.6.29 code base and
2.6.30 is getting better. But most of this stuff is pretty bleeding
edge and probably should have been run through staging.

Graphics are now at a much better level of support in Linux than they
have ever been. The number of supported chipsets is finally increasing
from just Intel chipsets to include a number of the ATI chipsets
more fully supported out of the box. ATI has probably put less
developer dollars into improving the drivers as compared to Intel,
but they are getting a fair bit of help from the community and
are communicating well with the developers. Fedora 11 has shifted
to the nouveau driver for nVidea hardware which in some cases exceeds
the capabilities of the native, binary drivers provided by nVidia.
nVidia is still not working at all well with the Linux community.

The graphics community could still use additional developers and
improved vendor support in general.

Jonathan: Is there anything we can do to make the community more open
and accessible to new developers? Keith: the wayland (sp?) project
is a new windows system (not X11 based) whic his using the new kernel
APIs which would not have been possible without accelleration and basic
configuration support in the kernel. The same is true for the Cairo
project. These new APIs and kernel support should enable an increase
in the velocity of change.

Jonathan: where are filesystems going? Ext4 was just pronounced
"stable". Ted: Two community distros (fedora and ubuntu) will be
shipping with ext4 and possibly even the default filesystem. Ted
has been using ext4 as his primary filesystem for over 6 months now.
ext4 has also atracted new developers and that of course leads to a
few new bugs as the new developers are less familiar with the constaints
and caveats of the ext3/ext4 body of code.

Jonathan: looking beyond ext4, when is btrfs (pronounced Butter FS or
sometimes just Butter) available (a common question for Chris Mason ;-).
Ted: btrfs is an exciting alternative but doesn't yet compare to the
four decades of experience behind the berkeley style ext3/4 family
of filesystems. It still has some work to be ready for production and
will probably be the follow on filesystem after ext4.

Jonathan: Are there too many filesystems? Ted: Some of the filesystems
are somewhat special purposed, e.g. for flash support or other unique
hardware configuration. However only about 7-8 filesystems make up
about 95% of the total customer base of filesytems in use today.

Andrew was key in shepherding in the a fs - but no particular insight
on what benefits it provides, although the code is very cleanly done and
appears as though it will be very well maintained.

Linux-next: is that working out well? akpm: Yes! It is doing a lot
of the work that he used to need to do for integrationn, testing, and
evaluation of new code. Stephen's work is helping tremendously, although
Andrew feels that the code base is not getting tested by as many
people as it should be.

Where are the biggest problems in Linus' tree coming from? Andrew:
typically they seem to be code that has skipped over linux-next and
gone straight to Linus' tree. That seems to be a bad model and more
people should be planning for including first in linux-next.

Should people be developing against linux-next? Andrew: probably not.
The code base is really not stable enough for that and the various git
trees are not not really well set up for this.


Are there too many developers? Has the rate of change decreased? Andrew:
no, not really. There seems to be a trend of established developers not
always seeing the changes from new developers that make it into the kernel.
In some cases an established developer will stumble across a new
directory in the source tree and find that the code is filled with newbie
mistakes. While this has the potential to be a problem in the long term,
it seems like the openness of the tree is helping to maintain the quality and as subsystems are used and encounter bugs or problems they still get fixed by the community.

Linux-next is causing a lot of email about merge conflicts between subsystems. Is that causing a problem and is it too hard to do develop in the kernel now? Answer from several: no, it seems to make it easier and points out the problems soon.

Question from the audience; Everyone pushes new developers to get code upstream. However, many subsystems seem to meet extreme resistence when pushing code upstream, e.g. uprobes, systemtap. Andrew points out that these subsystems are impacting the very core of the kernel and thus are more heavily scrutinized. Someone suggested that the code being pushed upstream would meet less resistence if the code were cleaner and better designed. Is this something that could be better documented for existing developers? utrace probably has a better chance of getting merged now that several core kernel developers are helping shepherd the code. In many cases, core kernel code being pushed by non-core kernel developers requires a level of responsiveness that those non-core kernel deveopers typically do not respond to. Questions about locking, API changes, overlapping capabilities, implications on other subsystems, etc. need to be answered and code review comments need to be agressively addressed by the developer to have a chance of adoption. Write and Post and never respond will clearly never get code into mainline/core kernel.

Some have suggested that your code should be so good that core developers want to pull your code into the kernel rather than having you push your code into the kernel.

Are there too many tracers in the kernel already? Is anyone actually using any of the tracers? Ftrace alone has probably a dozen tracers built into it. However, most of the documentation for tracing is only in the git logs for the code checkins, which is pretty pathetic.

Question from the audience: it seems that there are lots of functions duplicated in the architecture specific trees. How does one test all architectures for factoring out common code like that? Andrew: there is a linux-arch mailing list which is the contact point for all architecture maintainers to see this type of common factoring. Or, send to Andrew and he will send them out to the architecture maintainers until they stick.

Question from the audience: Things change rapidly, including drivers moving to different directories. Greg KH: the rate of change is still increasing at a linear rate. The usb subsystem changed from 2.6.10 to today, for instance. Is that rate of change going to continue? GregKH: Yes - that was a several year period of time and things change rapidly. Git logs and such help track those changes but things will continue to change.

Question from Christine Hansen: How are the highly experienced (aggregate 100 years of Linux use?) developers mentoring new developers? GregKH: I think about this a lot and we document more, we train people how to accept patches, contribute patches, etc. Christine: There is still a world-wide perception that most of the development is centered around Portland, OR, USA. At some point, all of you n the panel are going to Ascend. To a Mountain. But who will replace you? Is there anything done on the mailing list or within corporations? Andrew: Oleg Nastrov from Russia is a good example of an up and coming individual. And is an example of how someone can rise from nowhere and become a proficient developer. But the community seems to evolve - including people with great capabilities who disappear to other jobs, etc. Keith: Corporations have an ability to do internal mentoring driven in part by the corporations need to build and develop new engineers which helps with some of this within the ecosystem. Keith points out that the financial incentive for some programmers also help them fit into this mentoring environment. (My observation: corporations help make the best of any given individual, but Linux really draws extraordinary developers which often come from unexpected backgrounds. As one of my old mentors and teachers said, "Great Engineers are born, not trained. You can improve a good engineer with training and improve a great engineer with experience, but there is no replacement for a naturally excellent engineer).

A question on interface stability: As an example, iptables as a command needs to remain relatively stable but the kernel interfaces are rarely used by anything other than a small number of applications. Therefore an interlock between the key applications and the kernel is sufficient. There are some cases where this is just a plain old hard problem, such as X11 interfaces for mode setting in kernel - when a user level application does its own mode setting, you wind up with "impossible" conditions which can lead to a kernel crash. Ideally, the APIs would be stable enough for the applications but they should not have to be locked forever preventing new evolutions of a subsytem. Application interfaces tend to stay very stable but are handled on a case by case basis. If you can find a way for new applications to use new interfaces and old applications to continue to survive or to be updated to the new interface, we can over time migrate to a new interface and ultimately retire an API. BTW, this same level of stability is not applied to the in-kernel APIs since all providers and consumers of an API can be updated simultaneously in the kernel source thus obviating the need for long term compatibility interfaces. And, of course, good interface design enabling extensibility is ideal, although it is also impossible to envision all ways that an interface may need to evolve over time.

Ted: I don't know how to get the latest X server onto my distro (Greg: Get a Better Distro!) but some of these challenges are just inherent in the interlock between applications and the kernel.

Question from the audience: Where is new code coming from? Vendors, Hobbyists, etc.? Andrew: Seeing a lot of involvement from vendors to support their new hardware, e.g. Texas Instruments. Greg KH, over 20% of all kernel changes can still not be tracked back to a specific vendor. Ted: In the filesystem space, we still see a lot of people "scratching their own itch" - fixing the one thing that really bothers them. That often comes from non-corporate sponsored users trying to solve problems that annoy them, including university students, home users, etc.

GregKH collects per-release contributor information and feeds that to Jonathan and the LWN site to allow open tracking of the source of contributions.

A good session - very well received by the audience. After this, we are all off to lunch for a while. If my battery lasts, I'll continue tracking sessions.

Final comment from Jim Zemlin (with sustained applause) the LF is awarding an "unsung hero" award. The recipient is Andrew Morton. Andrew happens to be an avid racer and the Linux Foundation has arranged for a track day for Andrew. Only condition is to not get killed at the track.

Andrew tells a story about Mark Merlin and a Ferrari where he forgot to brake on the track and had a near-miss. Oops - we hope he remembers the break on his track day! ;)

Intel hands Moblin project to Linux Foundation; Imad Sousou speaks about the project at the LF Collaboration Summit

Linux Foundation has taken over the Moblin project from Intel.

Imad Sousou speaks about the Moblin project.

lesswatts.org, enablement for Intel platforms, enablement for Linux graphics, his group works on Xen, KVM, etc., entire development team is very impressive - primarily working upstream. Intel really "gets it" when it comes to open source.

Big companies are terrible stewards of large open source projects. IBM's handling of Eclipse is a good example of migrating stewardship outwards to enable a vendor neutral forum.

Rather than creating yet another new open source foundation for Moblin, Intel chose to transition the project to the Linux Foundation.

Linux Foundation has become very well respected and is well funded, especially given the current economic climate.

Moblin Governance: no disruptions to the project; subsystem maintainers and steering committee. Real key is that upstream is the place where anything "real" happens.

Why did Intel create Moblin? Have to understand a bit about how Intel Software development works. Intel's customers are asking for Linux. The Moblin effort really started with the advent of the thinking around the Atom processor. They needed an operating system to support all of the new devices that Jim mentioned in his previous talk.

Moblin would like to contain everything from the OS to the rest of the environment all included so end developers need only create the end user experience for their particular device. "Moblin is about enabling the best experience" "The user experience. The developer experience."

There are open source projects for nearly anything you can imagine. However, where Moblin (and other projects) tend to find gaps are in the seams between applications & open source projects. And that level of integration is where Moblin spends a good deal of its time (and that is of course also the goal of any major Linux distribution).

Moblin v1: A great start but: it lacked integration, it had technology gaps and the user experience was not as good as was desired.

Moblin v2: A clean break from v1, includes fastboot, new connection management, a lot of UI framework and enhancement work.

The Fast boot experience: fast boot is not a patch or a component. It is really about doing the right things right. Parallelizing bloat is still bloat. Booting in 60 seconds is really bad. Asynchronous actions are tools, not goals.

Boot times are now at 5 seconds (moving towards 2 seconds): kernel 1 second, core systems 1 second, graphics subsystem 1 second, GUI 2 seconds.

Next generation User Interfaces: real world versus computers. Will future UIs use standard controls and toolkits? More likely that the UI of the future is Animation Frameworks. Clutter is their focal area - Intel bought the company. Physics and 3D, Rich animations, Fluid and dynamic user interactions, compelling and innovative modern UIs, allows develepers to develop applications using the same techniques that game developers use.

Another area of focus is Connection Management. It's not only wired and wifi. It includes Bluetooth, WiMAX, 3G, Wifi, Ultrawideband, Telephone data (and voice). Needs to be seamless, enable roaming, and enables sharing.

Working on connman, existing solutions not designed with our goals in mind; changes at the time seemed harder than a clean start, separate UI from functionality. See Marcel Holtman for any questions (he's at the collab summit as well).

The Tools: PowerTOP, LatencyTOP, Project Builder, Moblin Image Creator.

There is a moblin track tomorrow all day. The agenda should be on the LF Events site.

Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit keynote notes

These may be a little ad hoc but here are some quick notes from the Jim Zemlin's welcoming talk on the state of Linux and the Linux Foundation at the third annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit.

Jim Zemlin kicked off the conference with an observation that even in tight times over 400 attendees made it to the 3rd annual Collaboration Summit.

Linux is now being used by nearly ever person in the world nearly every day (cue IBM prodigy video) followed by a slide showing a large number of servers and appliances where Linux is used.

3 trends and 3 opportunities...

Trend One: It's the Economy

IDC: 50_% Yes for servers and clients, 25% evaluating, 25% No on evaluating Linux.

Increasing mergers/consolidation driving IT infrastructure consolidation.

Linux brings lower costs, greater simplicity. A recession causes enterprises to re-think fixed cost assumptions iwth Linux on the desktop.

Linux-related software spending is to increase at 2-3X the rate of Unix and Windows in the overall market.

Linux is the primary beneficiary of the recession, growing 2-3 times faster than any other platform.

Trend 2: Redefining the desktop

Is this again "The Year of the Desktop"?

Old desktop, Thinkpad T20, over $1000, crappy battery.

Also had a Motorola "Flip Phone",

Apple iPhone, about same processor (really?) as Thinkpad T20.

HP Mini 1000, 1.6 MHz Atom, 120 GB Storage, wifi, bluetooth, web cam VOIP, $250. Note: Cheaper than the iPhone. Convergence is starting to happen - are phones the clients of the future? Or sub/mini-notebooks?

Is the PDA or desktop or Kindle the new desktop of the future? Is the TV the future? Mobile internet? Is your car the new desktop. Picture of a complex chair with panoramic display. Or will it be a holographic display interface a la MIT's Human Interface lab activities.

Linux can support any of these models today. Linux is a key and fundamental component of all of these interfaces.

Trend Three: The Cloud

It is real. Linux has the vast lead in the cloud computing space. List of companies: mozy, cassatt, flexiscale, opennebula.org, simory, elastra, mosso, dell, google, 3tera, morph, 10gen, salesforce.com, cohestiveFT, IBM, elastichosts, amazon web services, etc. etc.

Linux has the clear and dominating lead in the cloud computing space.

Opportunity #1: Standards

Linux standardization. Cool picture of penguins with different faces.

Major goal is to keep standards open and fair. Trying to avoid a de facto, lock-in "standard" such as what exists today.

Opportunity #2: Unified Defense

Still hearing that Linux may not be safe - a quadrillion dollars of money runs through the Chicago Merchantile Exchange today, all using Linux.

Open Invention network, defensive publications, software freedom law center, linux defenders, patent commons, peer to patent, open source, OSAPA, Post issue peer to patent, Linux Legal Defense Fund all out there, coordinating, making sure that Linux is a safe platform for end users. Working on both defending Linux within the systems as well as evolving the legal environment

Opportunity #3: It's not just about price:

Windows video looking for a laptop supporting his needs, under $1500. Microsoft is competing for the first time on price.

Now story of Zemlin's equivalent shopping experience. Google G1 @ $179, 42" plasma television $699, HP laptop $250, $99 DVR, and bought an OLPC and gave it to a child in need for $199 - all under the $1500 price paid in the microsoft commercial.

Linux is changing entire models from a technical and business sense.

What's going on at the Linux Foundation.

Events -> Web -> Workgroups -> Training -> Legal Defense -> Standards -> Promotion -> Fellows.

See Wikinomoics - #1 example is Linux. And now time for Linux to up the ante on collaboration.

Television training programs with live telepresense at any time, new social networking tools, fellowship programs to enable people to continue to maintain linux.com (kernel.org?).

Picture of 7*9 - 63 large members. This is where the greater Linux ecosystem comes together. New members are welcomed to get involved.