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OpenSolaris Developer Summit 2008, Day 2

By David Stewart (Intel) (138 posts) on May 7, 2008 at 10:53 am

• Day 2 of the Summit started with a panel discussion on Advocacy, which I was invited to help kick off. Advocacy is an interesting Community, because it includes the worldwide user group effort as well as evangelism for OpenSolaris. I praised the Advocacy efforts of Sun and others, relating how difficult it is to create a robust, self-sustaining community when you start out with software that was mostly developed "inside the walls" and then freed.
• Unlike more traditional panels, it was designed by the moderator, Jim Grisansio to be a "fish bowl". There was always an empty chair, as an invitation for someone in the audience to join the panel, and someone would then escape to the audience.

The rest of the day was a series of breakout sessions. Here are some random thoughts in no particular order:

• I sat in on a Documentation discussion. I mentioned that I often hear the need for documentation which helps people move from Solaris/SPARC to Solaris/Xeon, including porting apps, differences to expect, etc. I was told that there is an existing document on this, but it's a few years old. Sun is apparently working on updating it to Solaris 10. I also said that Intel might be able to contribute to this as well.

  (Of course, I come from an era when we used to say, "why do you need documentation? Just read the source!". But I degress).

• There was a fantastic session on Desktop advances, and the plans going into the next year's advances. In particular, when they talked about advances to NWAM (Network Automagic, the GUI which gets you onto a wireless network), there was a mockup of a connection management UI. I noted that there is a Linux project called "conman" (love the name) which might offer some collaboration here. (Another AR for Dave...). They were also showing how good compiz looked. I love it and use it on my VAIO.
• The session I recommended we add to the conference was on moving the SCM (source code management) system for the operating system outside the firewall. Most of the prepared remarks were on the process which will be used with Mercurial, and which pieces still need to be developed.
• I missed the session on the ARC... I thought it would be good to take off because a member of my team wasn't feeling too good and I wanted to get him to his hotel in San Jose.

Of course, the best thing about a Summit like this are the connections between people before and after the organized sessions. (And, sometimes during the sessions!)

I loved the live IRC chat which was projected on the wall during the sessions. This helped encourage live feedback from the room and people around the world watching the video screen.

The level of organization was better in my opinion than the last summit, though there was not as much of an ad-hoc feel.

Some people outside of Sun said they very much appreciated having Sun management there in the room listening to them. This should create all kinds of good will in the community.

I did hear a suggestion that we add a code sprint element to the event, which would get developers together to create code live in needed areas.

All in all, I thought it was a highly valuable event. I really appreciate Sun for creating and funding this event. It was a great way to get the community lined up for support.

Categories: Open Source

Comments (1)

June 26, 2008 2:24 PM PDT kcav Total Points: 80 Status Points: 30 Green Belt

Would like to chat about Conman. Can you suggeat a live connection.

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