Tag: open source

OSCON: Talking Shop With HP, Heroku, ForgeRock, Open Source For America, and More!

Today and yesterday I specifically aimed to meet and interview a number of sponsors and companies attending OSCON. My big quest I’d assigned myself was to determine who was doing what, where, when, and why in the Open Source Community. Of course I wasn’t going to get to every company, but I was going to try. Here’s what I got accomplished:

Hewlett Packard (AKA HP)

The big news from the HP Crew, in addition to the other zillion open source efforts they have going on, is that they’ve signed on as a partner with OpenStack! So more great news for that effort and bringing a standardized software stack to cloud computing! Getting HP signed on is one more big step toward this goal.

Even though I’ve mentioned HP first, I’m actually going to have a follow up dedicated entirely to HPs efforts in open source software. Stay tuned for that this weekend!

Heroku's New Laptop Location!
Heroku's New Laptop Location!

Heroku

Heroku was there handing out the swag, which won them the much coveted space on my laptop! I spoke with the team there, and there are rumblings of some great things, additional tooling stacks, and other ideas. Keep an eye on Heroku, not to much to mention right now but they have some awesome things coming in the near future.

ForgeRock, Simon Phipps, and Open Source for America

Hanging Out With the OSFA Crew (I'm the 2nd one from the right, ok, I'm actually the one on the right ;))
Hanging Out With the OSFA Crew (I'm the 2nd one from the right, ok, I'm actually the one on the right ;))

After speaking with HP I was introduced to the Open Source for America attendees. The Open Source for America, or OSFA, is setup to advocate, educate, and encourage open source software use within Government. They have the very important goal of educating political leaders and decisions makers that open source, not closed source, is much more aligned to providing their mission of liberty, freedom, and return for the citizens of the United States. The ideas, free market of software, and parallels of knowledge transfer within this software industry more closely meet the values that are intended within most civil representative Governments, which I agree totally, in this groups efforts!

Simon Phipps
Simon Phipps

While talking to the OSFA Team I was also introduced to Simon Phipps, who writes for Computer World UK, tweets as @webmink, blogs as webmink, works as CSO (Chief Strategy Officer) at ForgeRock, for full creds check out his LinkedIn Profile, and as he identifies himself, “Software freedom activist, transparency activist, blogger, photographer, writer”. I only spoke to Simon for a few minutes, but we covered some good ground, and must say Simon is one interesting character and a good person to know!

ForgeRock, being a company I’ll admit I knew nothing about until Simon told me about them, is doing some absolutely great work. Their lines include:

  • OpenAM – OpenAM is the market leading open source Authentication, Authorization, Entitlement and Federation product. ForgeRock provides the community with a new home for Sun Microsystems’ OpenSSO product.
  • OpenDJ – OpenDJ is a new LDAPv3 compliant directory service, developed for the Java platform, providing a high performance, highly available and secure store for the identities managed by enterprises.
  • OpenIDM – OpenIDM is an open standards based Identity Management, Provisioning and Compliance solution.
Stay tuned for further write ups regarding these companies and other related information to OSCON 2011.

OSCON: The Web, It’s HUGE! Cloud Computing More Realistically…

It is day 3 of OSCON data & java, and the kick off to the main keynotes and core conference. There are a repeating topics throughout the conference:

The Web, It’s Still HUGE!  Imagine that!

HTML 5, CSS3, JavaScript/jQuery/Node.js – This is starting to look like it will be the development stack of the web. If you use ASP.NET MVC, Ruby on Rails, PHP, Java, or some other web stack these core technologies are here to augment or even in some cases completely replace traditional web stacks.

Node.js can replace web servers in some situations when core APIs or other fundamental simple services are needed. In addition to that the Node server will eventually, I have no doubt, be able to completely replace traditional web servers like Apache, Tomcat, or IIS for almost any web site. In addition to web sites though, Node provides a very valuable engine to develop and test hard core JavaScript, building reusable libraries, and other server oriented needs. The other huge boost for Node.js is the ability for a dev shop to be able to centralize development around a single language. Something that Java and .NET have tried in the past, yet failed to ever achieve. The big irony is JavaScript never started out with this intent, but here it is!

In addition to Node.js making inroads to the server environments worldwide, JavaScript in general is starting to be used for all sorts of tools, stacks, and frameworks outside of just the browser. It can be used to submit a request against Hadoop, it can create a way to access and manipulate CouchDb, MongoDb, and other databases. Javascript is becoming the one language to rule them all (please excuse my Tolkenism 😉 )

Cloud Computing or More Realistically, “Distributed, Geographically Dispersed, Highly Available, Highly Available, Resilient, Compute and Storage Segmented Functionality, and not to forget, Business Agility Oriented Utility Computing“.

Long enough title? There are numerous open source cloud platforms and infrastructure offerings available. At OSCON there was discussion and multiple session about OpenStack, the Open Cloud Initiative, Stratos, and other open software solutions for cloud computing. This is great news for developer working with cloud computing technologies, especially for ongoing efforts and pushes to gain adoption of cloud computing within Enterprise.

Companies will continue to push their own proprietary capabilities and features, but it would behoove the industry to standardize on an open platform such as OpenStack. Currently most major cloud/utility computing providers such as Amazon Web Services and Windows Azure lock a company into their specific APIs, SDKs, and custom way of doing things. A development team that is savvy can prevent that, but if the core feature sets around comput, storage, and otherwise were standardized this lock in issue could be resolved.

Half Way Mark, Check

So far the conference has provided lots of insight into the open source community. Announcements have been made that keep the open source community moving forward into the future. With that, some of the things to look forward to:

  • I’ll have some in depth coverage of products, product releases, and services for some of the top open source companies.
  • I will hopefully win a Github T-shirt, to go along with my score of t-shirts for Heroku and others that I’ve received!
  • I’ll dig into some of the bleeding edge technologies around cloud computing including the likes of DotCloud!
So stay tuned, I’ll be back with the action packed details shortly.  Cheers!

OS Bridge Week in Review

This is the first time I’ve attended OS Bridge. I’d known about it before while living in PDX. I had seen numerous people sitting in Bailey’s, Backspace, and other places around town after the days of the conference in past years. This year I actually got to experience it myself and am stoked with the experience!

The conference started off proper on Tuesday and is wrapping up today (Friday). It has been a great ride. The conference is a community organized event, but you’d think it was a high end professional conference in many ways. The food was awesome, the sessions covered a huge range of topics, and people at the conference had a great attitude and energy around learning about the open source community and what it’s about!

High Points

There are a couple of things that really stood out to me above other aspects of the conference.

People

People in the OSS Community are not like other communities that I have often interacted with in the past. The OSS Community as a whole is a lot less likely to focus on negatives and instead is much more focused on learning, knowing new technologies, and creation of new software ideas, experiences, and opportunities. This by far sets the OSS Community apart from many other software communities. Open source software, with its very positive attitude about the future is in turn becoming the future of software development (Arguable, it already is).

Projects

The projects are some of the most wide ranging of many conferences that I’ve attended. Ranging from algorithms of odd complexities to zoological studies. There is no unturned stone in the realm of open source software. One of the binding themes in most of the projects, which is really what brings out an awesome aspect of open source, is that the projects are very community driven. I don’t mean just software community, but communities in general. The transit app, which of course would be one of my favorites (re: Transit Sleuth), is centered around enabling businesses within a community to encourage transit usage (something I strongly believe is fundamental to strong communities in urban areas). One other project was a geolocation game (see last blog entry) that encouraged socializing IRL (In Real Life) instead of just via the Internet on a device. This is the type of software that truly changes the way we live, the way we interact, and the way we as people better ourselves.

Panoramic Portland, Oregon (Click for larger image)
Panoramic Portland, Oregon (Click for larger image)

Portland

The final thing I wanted to mention, was how awesome Portland is for a conference like this. Many cities are NOT good for technical conferences, at least if you intend to geek out, study, learn, and actually make progress.  Las Vegas is often used and it is a horrible city. Los Angeles, can be good sometimes but often the conferences are held in the middle of nowhere. The list of places that are bad for conferences can get long, and conference organizers should take note. But Portland has a uniqueness that is unlike anywhere else in the United States. The list of positives is massive. The city is walkable, leave your car far away from the city, life is better here without it. The food options are huge, with the best food cart scene in the United States, arguably the world (see the tail end of my day #2 Coverage). Anthony Bordain has literally said the best food cities in America are New Orleans, Portland, Seattle, and New York which I can absolutely agree with (having lived in all but one of those cities now, but visited all of them many times). The list continues; coffee, beer, food, walk ability, massive bookstore (Powell’s), etc., etc.

Summary

I’m just gonna hit up a bullet list for this purpose, because the summary items are simple:

  • Portland is one of the best cities for technical conferences, hands down.
  • The people and the projects these people are working on at OS Bridge are amazing, life changing projects!
With that, I’m wrapping up my OS Bridge Coverage. I’m looking forward to next year already and seeing familiar and new faces. May the code flow forth on your open source efforts. Cheers!
Total Event Coverage by me, Adron:  Day #1, Day #2, and Day #3 Big news and Day #3 Review.
Coverage by John DeRosa:  Day #1, Day #2, Day #3, and Day #4.
Coverage by @Demew: Open Source Bridge 2011

OS Bridge, What is it?

I’m headed down to Portland, Oregon today for OS Bridge. OS Bridge is a conference for the open source community, by the community. The conference is one of the premier events to learn how open source really works, learn from others, and meet people that are also learning about and involved in the open source community.

The OS Bridge Conference, like almost all of the conferences that I attend these days, is all volunteers. There are no major sponsors shoving some message or product down your throat. There is no overhanging air of elitism (even though I’ll admit, for newcomers it is sometimes intimidating, but don’t worry we don’t bite ;)). It is simply about the community and about the software that individuals of the open source community work together to create.

The tracks are organized in an interesting way for OS Bridge. The OS Bridge Tracks are split in a way to encourage cross-pollination and in depth discussion. The tracks as I know them are:

  • Business – This focus will be around open source as a business, how to work with and interact with open source entities, pick licensing models, and other related facets.
  • Chemistry – The chemistry of open source revolves around setting up environments, infrastructure, and assuring the systems we build are working the way we expect. This track embodies getting your fingers dirty with a good hands on chemistry set. 🙂
  • Cooking – Recipes are essential to cooking. Keeping well organized recipes for system administration, software development and deployment, and other courses is key to a good meal of software development.
  • Culture – Within the open source community are individuals of many alignments, but one thing that really connects people in the community is the culture of learning, building, and working together to create things that are greater than their individual parts.
  • Hacks – Experiments. Nuff’ Said. 😉

Why Am I Going?

Over the years I’ve written a ton of software. As anyone in this industry might relate with, some has been thrown away and some is used currently. I’ve saved companies thousands, hundreds, even millions of dollars. I’ve been saddened by some software I’ve built and euphoric with other projects of software I’ve built. The things I have been consistently throughout my career is that I love to learn and am proud of what I do.

Over the last few years, because I like to learn and am proud of what I do. I have wanted to improve my development practices. The more I work toward improving and using new and better ways to do development I keep working with the open source community. There are a number of reasons;

  • The open source community is focused on learning and creating.
  • Open source software does not close or hide information, knowledge, or actual software.
  • The community is often the first to try something, often first to market, and is almost always pushing new ways to develop things.
  • Open source software bridges all technology stacks, even the once resistant Microsoft Stack has active and ongoing contributions to open source software now.

There is also one other fact that really pulls everything together. Just as we breath air, software developers share ideas and information. Regardless of legal obfuscations or otherwise all software developers, in some way, are involved with learning and furthering our trade. In the end, to do that, we work with each other and freely share information all the time.

That’s just a few reasons why I’m going, I could go on. Over the next few days I hope to put a few more blog entries about my experiences. I hope my insights are useful, Enjoy!