Notes from the Collaboration Summit [LWN.net]

By Jonathan Corbet
April 11, 2008

Your editor has certainly attended no shortage of Linux-related conferences. Many of those are developer conferences, which are invariably interesting events. Others are oriented around marketing or outreach, with rather more variable results. The Linux Foundation's Collaboration Summit, which ran from April 8 to 10, is unique, though, in that it attracts representatives from throughout the Linux ecosystem. Developers are not in short supply (though it seemed like there were fewer than last year), but those developers spend three days talking with corporate executives, industry analysts, and, crucially, a number of high-profile users. This mixture of people creates a very different dynamic which supports a whole range of interesting conversations.

One of the first events was the kernel developers' panel, moderated by your (normally rather immoderate) editor. Panelists James Bottomley, Matt Domsch, Dave Jones, Christoph Lameter, Ted Ts'o, Arjan van de Ven, and Chris Wright discussed a variety of topics ranging from kernel quality (getting better), code review, development process participation, hardware support, and more. Your editor was not able to take notes from the panel; perhaps the best report which has come up so far can be found in this InformationWeek article by Charles Babcock.

IDC analyst Al Gillen spent half an hour going through a bunch of chart-heavy slides on the future of Linux in the marketplace. Overall, things look good, in that a market worth $20 billion in 2007 is expected to go up to $50 billion in 2011. There were lots of associated details which have been reported elsewhere. One interesting aspect was watching how the analyst trade copes with "non-paid" Linux deployments - which, according to Mr. Gillen, is 43% of the total. There was talk about how "monetizing" these deployments is a challenge for those looking to make money in the Linux marketplace. He expressed surprise at just how many companies are confident in their ability to support Linux deployments on their own. But he also talked about just how important that non-paid base is for the support of the entire ecosystem. Non-paid deployments may be a "challenge" to those who would prefer to be paid, but their absence would be a rather larger challenge.

There was an echo of this insight when Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens talked. One of Red Hat's goals, he says, is to give customers the immense value that goes with a "zero cost to exit" offering. There is no RHEL lock-in. To that end, he says, the folks at CentOS have done Red Hat a great favor. Brian also talked about the difference between the old "selling the distribution" business model, which gave Red Hat an incentive to put lots of shiny new things into each release, and the current model, which puts the focus on continuity instead. Since Red Hat's customers have already paid for the next release, Red Hat doesn't need to add lots of cool new features to encourage them all to upgrade.

He then spent the rest of his talk on the various cool new features the company is working on, including messaging, realtime support, and more.

Marten Mickos, once CEO of MySQL and now a vice president at Sun Microsystems, gave a talk which was intended to make listeners feel good about Sun and its plans for free software. It bothers him, he says, when people ask whether MySQL will remain committed to Linux; it strikes him as a demonstration of uncertainty about the future of Linux in general. That uncertainty is unnecessary; Linux's future is strong, regardless of what MySQL does. But MySQL (and Sun) do remain committed to Linux as a platform; the era of monolithic computing platforms is over, and companies have to support customers who will make their own choices at each level in the stack. So LAMP as an "architecture of participation" will remain supported by Sun well into the future.

An industry panel on "the state of Linux" was a useful view into how some large companies see the platform. They are all seeing growth in Linux; Bdale Garbee (representing HP) noted that Linux is "showing up in everything" that customers are planning. IBM's Dan Frye said that Linux is ready for any kind of workload. Oracle's Wim Coekaerts did note, though, that Oracle's revenue from Linux, at a mere $2 billion, is "still lagging."

There was a fair amount of discussion on how to work with the development community; NetApp's Brian Pawlowski asserted that "money helps." By that, he means employing developers to work within the community and advance the platform. Bdale noted that HP tries to work "in" the community, not "with" it. Dan Frye echoed that thought, saying that it's important to have people with credibility in the community and to allow them to work inside the community for long periods of time. Motorola's Christy Wyatt, instead, worried that her company still doesn't have the necessary wisdom to work effectively with the development community; Linux and the mobile industry, she says, are still relatively new to each other.

Wim related a story from the first kernel summit wherein an Oracle representative presented a laundry list of desired features. That is, he says, not the right way to do things; the community tends not to react well to wishlists with no development effort behind them. Oracle now has a Linux development team which is entirely separate from the normal product teams; among other things, it has a blanket approval to contribute the code it develops, avoiding the lengthy and tiresome internal legal review process. The company has also adopted a policy of making projects open from the beginning, getting much-needed review early in the process.

Other participants noted that working with a company's legal department can often be the hardest part of community participation. Dan suggested bringing in the legal department at the beginning of a project and keeping them around; sticking with a single counsel who can slowly be educated in free software ways is also important. Bdale said that we were likely to need "legal domain experts" for some time yet, but that the situation is getting better; most lawyers now have at least some understanding of how free software licensing works. A couple of panelists discussed the legal headaches that come with mixing components with different licenses; they would certainly like to see fewer licenses going into the future.

The final session from the first day covered the state of mobile Linux. It was about the only contentious panel on a day where the majority of the sessions were mostly educational in nature. One area of disagreement was over security models. Some platforms (such as ACCESS) work with a fine-grained set of privileges, while Google's Android uses sandboxing and controlled access to resources determined by asking the user. The fine-grained approach is seen by some as an ideal way for carriers to lock down handsets and exert firm control over what handset owners can do - not the desired outcome. On the other hand, asking users is seen as insecure; it's not usually too hard to get users to agree to almost anything.

Perhaps the lowest moment in this panel came when Google's Eric Chu was asked about participation with the community as opposed to developing everything as a private fork. He replied that the Android code was open, it sits in a repository somewhere. But there will be no effort to engage with (for example) the kernel community and merge this code until it is "done." That approach runs against what others had been saying since the kernel panel that morning: one must get code out there as early as possible. When the Android developers finally decide that their code is ready, they are likely to have a nasty surprise when they try to merge it into the kernel and are told that much of it is unsuitable by design. Google came off looking somewhat bad here, but the truth of the matter is that most of the (many) mobile Linux projects are operating in similar ways. Getting these projects to really work with the communities whose code they are using is, as with many embedded applications, a challenge. One can hope that the suggestions given to these projects at the summit will be taken to heart.

That sort of communication is what makes this event worthwhile; it is often hard for this particular mixture of people to come together in other contexts. The Collaboration Summit was heavy on conversation in general, often to great effect. One well-known developer commented to your editor that the Summit had the biggest disparity between the official content and the "hallway track" that he had ever seen. The hallway track was good, with, hopefully, lots of good things to come from it in the coming months.

(Log in to post comments)