linux.conf.au 2009

The 2009 linux.conf.au was held in Hobart, on the island of Tasmania. The setting for LCA - typically on a university campus - is always nice, but it is hard to imagine a more beautiful place to meet than Hobart. As an added bonus, the mild temperatures offered a nice complement to both (1) the brutally high temperatures being felt on the Australian mainland, and (2) the rather severe winter conditions awaiting your editor on his return. A number of talks from LCA 2009 have been covered in separate articles; here your editor will summarize a few other things worth mentioning.

Prior to the event, your editor heard a few people express disappointment over the choice of keynote speakers this time around. As it happens, at least some of that disappointment was premature. It is true that things got off to a bit of a slow start on the first day, when Thomas Limoncelli delivered a hand-waving talk about "scarcity and abundance." Thomas is a good and entertaining speaker, but he seemed to think that he was addressing a gathering of system administrators, so his talk missed the mark. Unfortunately, your editor got waylaid and missed Angela Beesley's keynote on the second day.

The speaker for the final day was Sun's Simon Phipps. Your editor entered this talk with low expectations, but was pleasantly surprised. Simon is an engaging speaker, and he would appear to understand our community well. As might be expected, he glossed over some of Sun's more difficult community interactions, choosing instead to focus on more positive things and the interaction between the community and companies in general.

Simon's thesis is that we're heading into a "third wave" of free software. The first wave started, perhaps, before Richard Stallman wrote the GNU Manifesto; Simon notes that IBM's unbundling of the software for its nascent PC offering (in response to antitrust problems) played a huge role in defining the software market of the 1980's. But the Free Software Foundation brought a lot of things into focus and started the ball rolling for real. The second wave came about roughly with the founding of the Apache Software Foundation; that was when the world came to understand that free software developers can produce high-quality code. He gave Ubuntu as an example, and noted that even the Gartner Group has come to see some value in free software.

The third wave is coming as businesses really figure out how to work with free software. In his point of view, the right way is to do everything to drive adoption of the software; again, Canonical was held up as an example of how to do it right. One should only sell licenses, he says, to businesses who haven't figured out the true value of free software. Why, he asks, should a company which understands things buy RHEL or SLES licenses? (It's worth noting that a Red Hat representative took issue with that comment, not without reason).

"Third wave" businesses should work with something like a subscription model, selling support services as needed. Things like defect resolution, preferably done by people who have commit privileges with the project involved. Businesses can make upgrades easier, provide production support tools, or, if really needed, sell indemnity guarantees.

Some concerns were raised, the first of which was licenses. While noting wryly that his company "has done lots of experimentation" with software licenses, Simon identified license proliferation as a big problem. In the future, he thinks, the problems associated with proliferation will tend to drive projects toward a single license - most likely the GPL.

Another problem is, of course, software patents. Simon says we shouldn't worry too much about patent trolls, though; there is not much we can do about them in any case. A much bigger concern is companies (unnamed) which are working as members of the community but which are, simultaneously, filing a stream of "parallel patents" covering the work they do. Should one of these companies turn against the community, it could create all kinds of problems. For this reason, Simon is a big fan of licenses like GPLv3 or the Apache license which include patent covenants. Every company which engages the community under the terms of such a license gives up some of its patent weaponry in the process. The more companies we can bring into this sort of "patent peace," the better off we will be.

Even so, he says, the day may come when the community needs a strong patron to defend it against a determined patent attack.

Simon then asked the audience to consider what it is that makes a company a true friend of free software. Is it just a matter of strapping on a penguin beak, as the Tasmanian devil has done to become the LCA2009 mascot? The real measure of friendship is contributions to the community; Sun, he pointed out, has done a lot in that regard. In closing, Simon's message to "third wave" businesses was to keep freedom in mind. There is a place, he says, for both pragmatism and radical idealism. The biggest enemy of freedom is a happy slave; he held up his Apple notebook as an example.

In response to questions, Simon noted that the license problems with the sunrpc code will hopefully be fixed soon. The problem is that this code is 25 years old and there's nobody around who worked on it at the time, so determining its origins is hard. He also said that "pressure is mounting" to release the ZFS filesystem under a GPL-compatible license. And he suggested that, eventually, Red Hat will have to start selling support services for Fedora, since that is the distribution that people are adopting.

Freedom was also at the top of the agenda during Rob Savoye's talk. He discussed the launch of the Open Media Now! Foundation, which has been formed to address the problem of codec patents head-on. As Rob puts it, we all create content, we should be able to give copies of our own content to anyone. In addition, the data we create never goes away, but our ability to read that data just might. Plus, he's simply fed up with hearing complaints that gnash does not work with YouTube videos; it works just fine, but they cannot distribute gnash with the requisite codecs.

To deal with this problem, the Foundation is starting a determined effort to gather prior art which can apply to existing codec patents. With any luck, some of the worst of them can be invalidated. But just as much effort is going into figuring out ways to work around codec patents. Most patents are tightly written; it's often possible to find a way to code an algorithm which falls outside of a given patent's claims. When a proper workaround is found (and determining "proper" is a job for a lawyer), the relevant patent can thereafter be ignored. It is a far easier, more certain, and more cost-effective way of dealing with software patents, so Rob thinks the community should be putting much more effort into finding workarounds. He hopes that people will join up with Open Media Now and help to make that happen.

Matthew Wilcox managed to fill a room with a standing-room-only crowd (and not much standing room, at that) despite being scheduled at the same time as Andrew Tridgell. His topic - solid-state drives - is clearly interesting to a lot of people. Matthew discussed some of the issues with these drives, many of which have been covered here in the past. Those problems are being slowly resolved by the manufacturers, but there is a different class of problems which is now coming to the fore. There are certain kinds of kernel overhead which one doesn't notice when an I/O operation takes milliseconds to complete. When that operation completes in microseconds, though, that kernel overhead can become a bottleneck. So he has been working on finding these problems and fixing them, but it is going to take a while. He made the interesting observation that, at SSD speeds, block I/O starts to look more like network traffic, and the kernel needs to adopt some of the same techniques to be able to keep up with the hardware.

The Penguin Dinner auction was back this year, after having been dropped from the schedule in 2008. The auction is always an interesting event, often involving people deciding to spend a few thousand dollars on a T-shirt after having consumed enough alcohol to make any such decision especially unwise. This year's auction beneficiary was the Save The Tasmanian Devil organization, which came away from the event somewhat richer than it had hoped. After a long series of bids, matching offers, and simple passing-the-hat in the crowd, a large consortium of bidders managed to get a total of nearly AU$40,000 pledged to this cause. There was one condition, though: Bdale Garbee not only had to lose his beard, but it had to be done at the hands of Linus Torvalds.

The "free as in beard" event happened on the last day of the conference. As was noted in the live Twitter feed being projected in the room, it was most surreal to sit in a room of 500 people all quietly watching a man shave. Bdale's wife, who took the picture which was nominally the object being auctioned, has made it clear that he will not be allowed to attend LCA unaccompanied again.

In 2010, linux.conf.au will, for the second time ever, not be held in Australia. The winning bid for next year came from Wellington, New Zealand - a setting which rivals Hobart in beauty. Mark your calendars for January 18 to 23; it should be a good time.

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