By: Con Zymaris conz@cyber.com.au
Created: 1999-06-29
Modified: 1999-07-02
What follows is merely one individual's recollection of this one day event, held recently in Melbourne, Australia. This shouldn't be read as being the official coverage, as it is quite likely that I've missed important details, or perhaps skewed the presented talks in some way. I imagine I'll be sent corrections from the speakers or other attendees in due course :-)
The Australian Open Source Symposium (AOSS) was organised and supported by AUUG Inc, ISOC-AU, Linux Users Victoria and SAGE-AU. Primary sponsor was SCO.
More details about the event are outlined here http://www.auug.org.au/aoss/
The AOSS was held on Wednesday, 16th June, at theAustralian Industry Group training rooms, on St. Kilda Rd. Melbourne. This turned out to be an excellent venue for the attendees, if a little complex to find :)
After some initial hiccups with the video-projection system, the order of talks was flipped to allow Andrew Cagney from Cygnus Solutions to give his presentation on the GNU Debugger project. While Cygnus is based in California, Andrew works from Melbourne. To me, this clearly demonstrated what I believe is an interesting side-benefit of open source software projects. Mainly, that there is substantial scope for organisations to procure their technical skills across international borders, increasing the range and size of their resource pool, and of the staff that they can attract. I assume this is so because many of the tools and development methodologies which have come to fruition via open source projects, such as CVS, web-based and distributed help-desk systems, command line tools, also lend themselves greatly to distributed software development in general. Added to this is the fact that the Unix-like operating systems are fully functional to remote users, which makes for easier integration testing by developers when code-merging occurs, as will be the case when geographically distributed developers are used.
Andrew gave an amusing presentation which included discussion on the complexities involved in development and maintenance of the GDB, mention of vast array of CPU architectures and target platforms supported, the use of similar tools in the future devlopment of Sony PlayStation II games, and the heuristics used to know when to deprecate support for lesser used platforms/CPUs. He also presented graphically the code increase of the GDB system, noting the large leaps in size at various milestones, such as when HP merged a substantial amount of code into the main source tree in the near past. During some Q &A, Andrew outlined that various techniques of modularisation of code for the various target platforms was being looked as a means to keep the overall size of the GDB down.
After Andrew, I gave talk titled The Diary of an Open Source Project. More details on this are available here .
Next came a solid presentation from Rajkumar Buyya from Monash University, on the topic of Parallel Processing with Linux. This was a substantial overview of the current state of play with Linux clustering technologies. Various models for building high performance computers where presented, including Beowulf clusters. Numerous high speed, TCP/IP and non TCP/IP networking technologies were looked at, along with analysis of the advantages and disadvantages. Management of Linux clusters was discussed, including outlines of tools which made the cluster as a whole look like a single computing device. Advantages given for why Linux clusters are good vehicle for various high-performance computing needs included: reduction in acquisition cost, reduction in downtime (if one unit crashes, the remainder keep running,) reduced on-going maintenance costs, etc.
Geoff Wong, a member of the Eddieware core team was up next. He talked about both the technical aspects of Eddie, as well as the political effort involved in getting Eddie's primary sponsor, Ericsson to release the code under an open source licence. Eddie is 'aimed at delivering a commercial grade, quality of service driven web server solution' Eddie has been written in the functional programming language, Erlang (www.erlang.org) In detail, Eddie functions by having specified servers operate as controllers, distributing incoming traffic across designated back-end servers. These controllers also keep tabs of the availability (and load) of the backend web server. Eddie currently comprises an enhanced DNS server which provides load balancing and monitoring of site accessibility and an intelligent HTTP Gateway which provides site based load balancing, reliability, scalability, and quality-of-service.
Around about now, we had a break for lunch, and dined on some delicious gourmet rolls and a fruit/cheese platter. This gave a good chance to catch up to people and find out how other open source projects around town were going.
After lunch came an interesting presentation from Graeme Gill , on the technicalities of the output of Colour from applications in an open, portable, interoperable manner. Graeme focussed on introducing the primarily programmer-oriented audience to the physics and biology of colour and colour quantisation. He discussed the various schemes presently used for providing accurate metrics of colour on monitor screens and in printers for generating hardcopy. Graeme talked about the problems of closed, proprietary mechanisms and code for providing these metrics, and his wish to produce an open system to foster the wider spread of quality colour output systems. He described the colour quantisation library he has developed, which he is releasing under the LGPL, with the hope that it will be widely accepted and utilised, and thus assisting adoption of the open standard used. During the Q & A, someone raised the issue that this kind of library could be used to give The Gimp the kind of professional colour management functions it presently lacks.
The following talk was given by my colleague Richard Keech . He covered the nitti-gritty of Red Hat's Package Management System. Included in the discussion was why RPMs are useful, how they worked, how to build source, binary and platform neutral RPMs, and RPMs for non-Linux OSs.
Peter Laytham from SCO was up next. He wanted to give the audience SCO's perspective on Open Source. He discussed the advantages to SCO of having an ever-growing base of Unix skills and applications. He suggested the advantages were a 2-way street, in that that success of open source was made possible by the major reduction in hardware costs which have arisen through mass-market pervasiveness generated by closed-source software. Peter hinted that one area where open source software could use increased advocacy, was in calming corporate fears of stray code from non-open source applications making its into way widely used open source applications, exposing the corporate users to some form of legal liability. During the Q & A session, this topic was examined, and only instances of GPL'd code finding their way into closed-source applications were noted, not the other way around.
After afternoon coffee & tea, there was a panel discussion on open source licencing. Included on the panel were Andrew Cagney, Enno Davids (from Metva and current president of AUUG-Vic) and I. Numerous (thorny) questions had been garnered from the audience, including various problems with the GNU library licences as they pertained to emedded systems; incorporation of code into a project which had no clearly defined 'owner', and which could cause the open source developer to fall legally foul if shown to be acquired from non-open source means; discussion on which licences the various developers chose for their products, and why. There was also discussions of how various licences would hold up under severe legal scrutiny or indeed in court. It was generally agreed that the GNU and BSD licences would have the best shot of coming through unscathed in any legal proceedings. There was also some discussion of the proposed U.S UCC - article 2B, renamed recently to UCITA (Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act.) This will allow closed-source vendors to do things like disable end-user applications remotely, and make reverse-engineering illegal.
Finally, the floor was opened to members of the audience to come up onstage and pitch their open source projects and ask for potential members
Thanks go to Michael Paddon, Adrian Close and Susie Close, and numerous other AUUG and LUV folks for helping to organise this successful event.