Jeremy’s Thoughts

Another busy day today. Started out with Systems Engineering in the morning and Professor Dan Frey talking about the Design of Experiments. Another session where I can easily see where in a physical engineering field, it would have a lot of relevance and could be easily applied. Software, still, not so much. Maybe if you're doing human factors/user interface you could take advantage of some pieces of it but I'm not entirely convinced. And if you're doing things at a lower-level, then almost certainly not. When you're designing a software system at that level, you don't really have knobs and levers to adjust and then see how they change some sort of outcome — instead, your design is focused on functional requirements and just meeting those requirements. And then adjusting as the requirements inevitably change.

Later in the day, I had my final-for-now FESCo meeting. As some may have noticed, I have decided not to run for FESCo this time around. There are a variety of reasons why this is the case and it's really not worth going into all of them. One thing that will be nice will be having one less meeting a week to need to attend. Although I'll probably still chime in frequently enough from the cheap seats.

After that, it was off for a trip to the dentist. Biked there, got there right on time and then got to wait half an hour for the dentist. *sigh* Eventually got things taken care of and was on my way, if a bit later than I had intended.

Then, this evening, we had another SDM Connect event. I tried to organize it more in the fashion that Alyson had started things off in last year — very informal and low-key. And so I asked the inimitable Yoav Shapira to come and talk about his startup/entrepreneur experience and what helped (and didn't help) from his time at SDM. As usual, he gave lots of good information and insight and it was good to see him again. Everyone seemed to enjoy it and I think that the format kind of “clicked” with people to some extent. Or so I'm hoping. A few people had some ideas about future speakers and I told them to let me know and hopefully we can get SDM Connect to happen again on a more regular basis.

Then, home and now it's time to head to bed. Tomorrow, I'm getting FIOS installed… hopefully they've figured out cable cards (as I'm still quite happy with the Series3 Tivo) by this point and it'll be painless. But, I'm going into it expecting basically the worst given that it's a telecom company. We'll see how it goes.

Fedora, Life, Livejournal Imports, MIT SDM fedora, life, sdm

And by popular (by which, I mean one person) demand, a screencast of plymouth on the live cd.

Screencast

Currently using vesafb to get the pretty graphics instead of modesetting. And there's something slowing down livecd boots the past couple of days, but I haven't gotten around to looking at what it is. But it lets you see the basic idea.

Fedora, Livejournal Imports fedora

One of the goals for Fedora 10 is to replace the aging rhgb that has been used for graphical boot since Red Hat Linux 8.0. rhgb is implemented using an X server which started in rc.sysinit relatively early during the boot process and then some feedback is provided to the user. With some of the improvements underway for Fedora 10 we should hopefully have kernel modesetting in place at least for some drivers which will let us set a native resolution graphical mode as opposed to requiring either text-mode, an X driver + server or the use of a framebuffer.

Given this, enter plymouth — a new graphical boot implementation which will be taking advantage of that infrastructure. And since we don't need the X server or anything that's really complicated, we can even include plymouth in the initrd and provide that nice graphical experience earlier in the boot process. The bits landed for the regular initrd a couple of weeks ago and I finally got around to looking at integrating things for the live initrds the end of last week and finished it up yesterday. So now, we should have the new graphical booting hotness for livecds as well. And once the kernel modesetting pieces land in rawhide (I'm looking at you krh , that should be easily hooked up also making things quite nice in time for the Fedora 10 alpha.

Now on to the next thing on my todo list…

Fedora, Livejournal Imports fedora

Got out and had a couple of nice, fast rides this weekend. Saturday was a double dinosaur for a metric century and then about fifty miles yesterday. And I'm doing pretty well at getting my speed up while still being able to do some sprinting from there. Should help a bit when racing. My original plan for the weekend had been to do the Wells Ave training race on Sunday, but it ended up being cancelled for various reasons. But, the intense training rides were a good substitute. And then hopefully I'll get down to Wells Ave this Sunday instead.

Otherwise, a pretty uneventful and low key weekend.

Then, spent today in the office taking care of a few things. Ended up spending a lot of time talking with people about various things and made little progress on my attempt to get us down to one set of keyboard data. I think that the quickest route to actually making this happen is going to be to take the Debian ckbcomp perl script and just pre-run it against the xkeyboard-config data into a package for the “primary” keyboard maps. And then if you want to generate your own for an abnormal case, you can. Eventually it would be nice, though, to get ckbcomp written in C and do the xkb -> console keyboard mapping done at boot-time (or even within loadkeys directly). If it's something you're interested in working on, let me know and I can point you in the right direction.

Cycling, Fedora, Livejournal Imports cycling, fedora

One of the things provided for Fedora contributors is access to fedorapeople.org for hosting various web content. One thing that has become somewhat common there is hosting a git repository for someone to take a look from time to time. And since its inception, making this a little bit nicer has been one of the things I've hoped to be able to do.

Now that we have some time from observing the load and feel that the box isn't terribly loaded, I spent some time this afternoon making things a bit nicer for users who want to have a small git repository hosted there. As of right now, this should be considered beta (at best) and it may go away based on some trial time. Also, if you are hosting something more substantial with a number of contributors, I strongly suggest using fedorahosted instead. With those disclaimers out of the way, here's the basics for using it.

• Create a public_git directory in your home directory

• Put your git repository under this directory. Common methods for initially doing this would be rsync or scp of a repository you already have.
• Touch the git-daemon-export-ok file in the repository. This makes it so that others have access to the repository
• You can also set a description for the project by editing the description file in the repository
• Users can clone your repository via something like git clone git://fedorapeople.org/~katzj/isomd5sum.git
• You can see your project listed in gitweb once the project list updates (hourly). Note that this URL may change

And that's all there is to it. The documentation for fedorapeople has been updated with this information as well. Let me know if you run into any problems.

Fedora, Livejournal Imports fedora

Today was the last day of FUDCon and as opposed to the past two days of hackfests, today was instead set up as a bar camp style unconference and held at the BU Photonics Center. This was our fourth time at BU, third at the Photonics Center, and as always, the accomodations were perfect for what we needed.

The morning started off with me swinging by to meet up with so that we could bike down to BU. Had a nice relatively leisurely ride down and then helped make sure that things were set to begin. As is usual for a barcamp, the number of people interested in pitching a session was high and most of them had high amounts of interest. I pitched both a reprise of my LiveCD talk from the summit as well as a talk to help people get started with git.

After the pitching and arranging of talks, I ended up going to a number over the course of the day. In the first slot, I switched a bit between the Java/Eclipse talks and mmcgrath's talk on a Community Services Infrastructure. Then, it was on to do my git talk. This went pretty well, although I could have easily filled up more time. I tried to get a screencast of it, but was unsuccessful. But I might try to turn some of it into a series of posts for posterity sake. After sandwiches for lunch, I headed to the discussion of requirements for a new SCM system. This is something that I need to try to carve some more time out for as it probably is something that can get us big wins. But I'm not really sure where that time can come from at the moment :-/ In the next slot, I ended up going to the Upstart talk over the TurboGears 2.0 talk and in retrospect, probably should have gone the other way. But so it goes. And finally, I gave my livecd talk quickly and then went to heckle davej a bit

Finally, stickster gave a State of Fedora talk and then it was on to FUDPub where I spent the evening (and longer than I originally intended) hanging out and chatting with folks. Finally, I'm home and pretty much beat. It's been an extremely full 5-ish days and I'm definitely feeling it, both from a lack of sleep as well as the “oh, so much information exchange” perspective. But, it's also been a good few days.

But now, it's time to try to get a little bit of homework done before bed so that hopefully I can get out on a ride in the morning and maybe make substantial progress on finishing up the homework tomorrow. Because Monday brings the beginning of another full week…

Fedora, Livejournal Imports fedora, fudconboston2008

Jim Whitehurst took some time out of his almost certainly busy Summit schedule of talking with press, analysts and customers to actually come and talk with attendees of FUDCon for an hour or so. I took some notes about what he said. Any mistakes are mine and probably don't represent what he said

He started off with some big points.

• Red Hat is following the spirit of GPL and open source, not just the letter of them. This was a reiteration of what he had said in his keynote yesterday.
• An example of this is the recent patent settlement; the settlement protects open source overall
• ODF work over OOXML is pretty public; the Liberation fonts (announced last year) are metric compatible with “other common models”
• Red Hat has built a business model to build a community and work with them and then make the software Enterprise Ready ™. This is very consistent with open source
  • Take Fedora every two years or so and freeze it

  • Test it, tune it, performance testing, etc
  • Then tell enterprises that Red Hat will support that for 7 years
• Currently, about 15-20% of the value of open source is gotten by the customer
  • Iterative innovation

  • But the bits are being used in a traditional way. We need to work more to help merge customers into the community. There are some examples where this already has occurred
    • NSA work on SELinux

    • JP Morgan work on on the M part of MRG
• Anecdote: RHEL has the highest security clearance of any OS by the Russian Defense. Due to SELinux, written by the NSA, … But since they can see the source, they can audit it and feel comfortable with the code.
• As leaders of open source, Red Hat needs to recognize the power of the community and bringing the rest of Red Hat and the customers into Fedora
• You can't continue to apply old world economics of property to abundance of knowledge and information.

After that, things were opened up to questions and there were plenty

Q: What can we do to improve the experience for new people wanting to come into the community? (quaid)
A: Need to invest real dollars and work hard to make the lives of developers easier, turn it into a place that developers want to be. Michael Tiemann is talking to customers to try to figure out how to get customers involved in open source more directly. One thing is to evangelize open source principles vs just open source software

• Open source is as much about interactions with community as much as just opening the source. (side note — this is a huge and key point that I've been picking up based on reading various blogs and also from some of the stuff that was talked about in my Tech Strategy class)

Q: Are you talking with C-level execs at companies that are customers to try to help them understand some of the value of open source and helping to get internal innovations to be opened (stahnma)
A: Take case studies that we have (M of MRG by JPMC, Electronic Service Bus (ESB) for JBoss written by a Canadian insurance company) and showing the benefits that they gained by actually open sourcing — lower maintenance costs, improved rate of innovation and improvement. Support is provided by community. Big wins for them.

Don't get too transactional during the sales process; we have to make the message clear and convince customers to be a part of the community if we're really going to get things to thrive. Have to get out and help the smaller companies who don't employ a lot of Comp Sci PhDs to get it. C-level execs don't even necessarily know about the RHEL usage within a company, have to raise the awareness.

Q: How does Fedora fit into Red Hat's desktop strategy? (notting)
A: Red Hat's desktop strategy is horribly misunderstood. Red Hat is, will be, and should be a provider in the Enterprise desktop space. As a business, we make open source accessible to the Enterprise. We need to invest more heavily in the desktop to improve the Enterprise desktop space. We've underinvested to avoid being in the consumer space

As for the consumer space and why it doesn't make sense — there are very few companies successfully sell to both enterprises and consumers. Even Microsoft is just getting into the Enterprise. And for 95% of the world, there is little reason to be paying for a consumer desktop. Average person doesn't really have a need for paying for support. We don't want to exploit open source or our brand — we could sell lots of copies at $5 a pop. But we're not set up to do support, etc.

As a consumer desktop, Fedora is incredible. “Fedora is so much better than RHEL”. Fedora has newer hardware support, faster, newer stuff. It's a phenomenal desktop. The ecosystem is important — you get used to what you're using. Fedora therefore plays a key role in keeping us on desktop for non-enterprises. And the components then flow back into Enterprise desktop and people are comfortable with it.

Q: What about OEMs wanting to do Fedora preloads? (jkeating)
A: Good idea, the more people we can get using Fedora, the better. But there are questions around what the right place to draw the line for the brand is good. If you have to add a proprietary driver, should they be able to use the Fedora brand?

Q: What is RHT doing to get commercial open source companies more involved? (dgilmore) Eg, zimbra won't let people from the outside contribute to it; if you're going to install it, you have to follow guidelines; etc.
A: A lot of companies see open source as “cool” right now. Two different versions offered, etc. Not meeting the spirit of open source. When meeting with the CEOs of these companies, advise them as to the spirit and try to help educate.

Q: How much do you meet with Shuttleworth or worry about Ubuntu? (wwoods)
A: They're big players. Has real issues with their model — it's self-promoting and the question of meeting the letter vs the spirit of the GPL and open source. We work hard to match the spirit of open source, not just the letter. Would like to meet Mark because he's an interesting character.

Q: What's Red Hat and Fedora's role in Free Media? (mizmo)
A: We have a limited amount of time for our influence and have things closer to home. But we are supportive of it in general, just limited resources for it.
Q: Brought up by press release about Spacewalk being WMV or Realmedia only.
A: We should look into that and fix it. Will look into it.

Q: Much of open source is individuals scratching an itch. What about patterns of growth for corporations contributing to open source? (sadmac)
A: Condor (G in MRG), oVirt, are projects which are things that an individual doesn't generally need.
A: (skvidal) Look at moodle, universities working on PeopleSoft replacement, … So there's some success, but it's a little slow.
Q: Are there efforts to find things like that to be replaced? (wwoods)
A: No. We don't do a good enough job there. And we're hoping to do better. Factoid: Looking at Enterprise IT spending on software — it's $200 billion. Of that, $130 billion is not spent on apps or databases. Its spent on infrastructure stuff.

Q: Mobile device space. Should Red Hat be doing something in that space? (skvidal)
A: Would love to see Fedora targeting the space. Us being involved from community is easy and obvious, but harder to figure out commercial aspect

Q: Should we be paying attention to user side of web application development in Fedora? We have lots of TurboGears people. (skvidal)
A: Send mail and talk about it more.

Q: As a follow-up to trying to get more customers as a part of the community. Are there fears of hijacking if community gets larger?
A: You have to have faith in the model. No protection around that explicitly through licensing, etc. Continuing to have real leadership across key areas/projects is one aspect that helps. And really, if you think about it, this would be a great problem to have to worry about.
A: (jkeating) Have to provide strong leadership and not leave a vacuum when building a community

Q: Any fixes to prioritize during the hackfest? (sadmac)
A: Wireless for the eeepc required a binary blob. Can't really think of anything specific otherwise. Sprint wireless card just worked in Fedora 9 with NetworkManager.

Q: So you feel the pain of open drives not being available. What do you think of our strategy of not compromising and not shipping the non-open drivers? (warren)
A: It's a pain, but our strategy of not compromising has helped to drive change. Need to get nVidia onboard. AMD (ATI) changed because of us. “Stay the course”. One of the big differences between us vs Canonical. We're true to open source. Sure, you can make it easy, but you won't change the world just by taking the easy path.

Thanks to Jim for taking the time to talk with us and also for being so candid and open on a variety of topics!

Fedora, Livejournal Imports fedora, fudcon, fudconboston2008, rhsummit2008

Yesterday was the official beginning of the Summit and, per usual, things started off with a few keynotes. Jim Whitehurst, the new CEO of Red Hat, started things off with a bit of affirmation of the Red Hat strategy and the value of open source. The second keynote was by Dr John Halamka about the role of openness within health care which was pretty interesting. After the keynotes, I headed back to the Fedora table to hang out and get ready to do my presentation which had the second slot of the day.

For my presentation, I talked a bit about the work on and with Live CDs within Fedora — everything from the history to how they work to where things are going. The talk went pretty well, although the room was less full than I thought. If you're going to be at FUDCon, though, I'll probably reprise most of the talk. And I'll be putting up the slides later today once I've fixed a couple of bugs I found in them.

The rest of the day was basically spent at the Fedora table and talking with lots of people about various things. Then, headed over to Fenway for the party there. Where I had basically the same plan which was to talk with lots of people. Finally, headed home and crashed so that I could get more sleep for today and the start of FUDcon proper. But I could still have done with a little bit more …

Fedora, Livejournal Imports fedora, fudconboston2008, rhsummit2008

At FUDCon or the Summit and want to try out a talk? There are “Campground Sessions” available for people to give talks and demos as part of the Red Hat Summit. Note that this would be great for doing a first run of a FUDcon presentation you're looking at doing on Saturday. If you're interested, go to the back of the Exhibit Hall and sign up on the whiteboard there. And apparently, if you sign up to do a session tomorrow before 1 PM it will get listed in the little “newspaper” type thing that gets printed.

Fedora, Livejournal Imports fedora, fudconboston2008, rhsummit2008

After class yesterday, I headed over to the convention center to register for the Summit and see who else was around. Ran into a few people from the Westford office and we went past security to get a jump on registering. Then, I headed over to man the Fedora table until some other folks showed up to help. The table is outside the exhibit hall area right next to the Red Hat Cool Stuff store and we should have someone manning it consistently to put Fedora 9 (with updates as of Monday) onto a USB stick for you. Conveniently all Summit attendees get a 1 gig usb stick when they check-in

Anyway, hung out at the table for a while as various Fedora folk started to show up. Also ended up helping the IT guys to get some of the laptops to work better. Then a bunch of us eventually headed to dinner around 9 or 9:30. As has become some sort of sick Fedora in Boston related tradition we ended up eating at the Uno's on Boylston. We left just before the streets exploded with honking horns and many drunk people (the Boston Celtics won the NBA championship last night). Biked home and made it home just before 1.

And now I'm back at the convention center and I made sure things look good with the IT guys. Then breakfast and it's time for day 1's keynotes to begin….

Fedora, Livejournal Imports fedora, rhsummit2008