After being on the core team for linux.conf.au 2012 in Ballarat, it was somewhat of a relief to just be a delegate for the 2013 conference in Canberra. Luckily, I’d pre-arranged leave from work a few months earlier before starting a new role, but the downside was that I knew there would be a few  work emails that would need attention during conf, so I packed my thumping 17″ gaming laptop. Big mistake. It weighs nearly 2kg, and doesn’t fit neatly into my backpack handbag anything.  Next time, the little netbook comes with me instead!

After a quick trip to Melbourne airport on the Gull Bus, where I got to catch up with a couple of people from work who were also going, it was time for a Ballarat crew reunion – we’d booked out a whole row on the Qantas flight up. While waiting for the flight, we also had a chance to meet quite a few other Victorians who were going up, and we all got introduced to each other. Win! It was great to catch up and reminisce about the amazing experience we’d had last year, and get excited for this year’s conf.

Qantas really impressed me on this trip – with buffeting winds, the pilot was able to give us a smooth takeoff and landing, and the service was impeccable – a far cry from some of my previous Qantas experiences. MEL to CBR was much shorter than I’d anticipated, and within an hour we were disembarking. My first impressions of Canberra Airport were that it was small – around the side of Adelaide airport. The lack of shops and eateries seemed surprising, but it was wisely pointed out to me that most of the travellers through Canberra are generally fly-in, fly-out, and not wanting to hang around.

A quick, well-organised shuttle bus to Australian National University’s John XXIII College and we’d arrived at linux.conf.au. Registration was an absolute breeze. Organisers this year had sent people ‘boarding passes’ with a barcode that was used by Rego Desk to print badges. So, so easy. Next, it was off to Barton and Garran Hall for accommodation. On entering the room, my schwag had already been placed on the desk, with a t-shirt in my size, and my pre-ordered KeepCup. Fantastically awesome!

#lca2013 KeepCup

That night, it was off to Debacle for Ghosts’ dinner. Absolutely delicious pizza and tapas, and a lovely way to get into the spirit of linux.conf.au. It was a great chance to catch up with Ghosts past, and hear their views on how the community had changed over time. Then, time for a delicious gelato (hazelnut of course!) on the way back before a quick shower to stave off the oppressive humidity – and an early night.

Bdale Garbee

Monday kicked off with a keynote by industry luminary Bdale Garbee, whose presentation centred around some of the changes and directions he’d observed in the technical direction of Linux. He noted that Linux was gaining ground in the mobile space, as the entire world shifts from the desktop to the laptop, to the tablet and to other mobile devices. His key message was that end users want applications that work seamlessly across platforms, and noted the key pickup in cloud services that offered these experiences. He criticised developers for making it difficult for end users to be able to modify their own applications, and similarly advocated that students should be taught more theory rather than vocational-style ‘how tos’ in a particular product or vendor suite. He also noted that there is no incentive for manufacturers to save costs by loading free and open source operating systems on their hardware instead of Windows; Microsoft provide significant financial incentives to OEMs not to load alternative operating systems – so it’s not in their financial interest. This was an eye-opener, given my recent negative experiences with getting a Win8 laptop to dual boot and having to work around UEFI. A solid talk, but not one I would classify as inspirational.

I had intended to sit in on the MobileFOSS miniconf to get a better handle on what’s happening in this space, but I needed to catch up on some work so headed back to the dorm rooms.

Radia Perlmann

Tuesday started with a keynote by Radia Perlmann, inventor of the spanning tree network protocol, who provided an overview of the invention of a number of key network protocols, including IP. The really interesting take away from this talk was that the best protocol is not necessarily the one that gets adopted – the selection is not a rational process, and evangelism is a key part in driving forward a number of initiatives. She walked the audience through the spanning tree algorithm using a series of pictures – which communicated the point very well. Her engaging nature, passion, use of appropriate anecdotes and delivery style made her an excellent speaker. I will never forget the story she provided in closing, where she recounted where her son, at that time a toddler, had come running up to her with what appeared to be a sore arm. After kissing it better she asked him ‘What happened?’, to which he replied ‘I got pee on it!’. In Radia’s words,

Make sure you’re solving the right problem

Then, it was off to the dorm rooms to grab my Arduino Lilypad gear for my Haecksen Miniconf presentation.

Fee Plumley

After my talk, Fee Plumley spoke on open cities and nomadic creative digital culture and one of the quotes she used in her presentation really resonated;

The law doth punish man or woman
That steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater felon loose
That steals the common from the goose.

Her ideas were around how decentralised communities, based on open source models, can operate more effectively than existing urban constructs. Really amazing lady, and wish I’d had more time to spend chatting with her.

Ruth Ellison

Ruth Ellison, a UX practitioner based in Canberra had one of the most inspiring talks at Haecksen. She opened with a great quote;

Everyone has lasers in their garage, right?!

and proceeded to tell the audience about how she uses open source technology to make laser-cut jewellery using a laser cutter. She’s an active member of Canberra’s Make Hack Void and Maker communities, and one half of the jewellery business CrankyBot. One of the most inspiring pieces she had was a 3D jewellery visualisation of climate ranges, plotted in SVG and then cut with a laser cutter. Inspirational stuff.

Katie Miller

Katie Miller  presented about teaching girls FOSS, and went through a case study of the best way to deliver teaching of FOSS by getting people actively involved, having tangible outcomes, and setting the difficulty level right so that people were challenged but not overwhelmed.

Next, I really wanted to see the Browser Miniconf sessions which dealt with the history of web development, and advancements in HTML 5, but caught up with work shennanigans ;(

Wednesday morning was the PDNS breakfast, which I didn’t go to.

Rusty Wrench goes to Donna Benjamin

During the conference opening, Donna Benjamin was awarded the Rusty Wrench award for services to the Australian open source community. Very well deserved.

Next, I took Peter Chubb’s excellent shell tutorial – I’m a bit rusty and it was a great refresher.

Adam Harvey

One of the standout presentations for me was Adam Harvey’s talk on ‘Users delighted’ which covered advancements in CSS3, HTML5 and user experience (UX). The key takeaways for me were that everything we do in this space needs to make it easy for users to do what they need to do, independent of what or where they’re doing it from. He’s a strong advocate of responsive design, and an excellent presenter. One of the key quotes from the talk was;

We were at the pub, as you do, because if you’re a web developer it’s the only thing that numbs the pain of IE6

Adam advocated the implementation of open web standards, and noted frustration with having to write browser-specific workarounds in CSS for different browser families.

Thursday’s keynote was Bunnie Huang, who invented the Chumby. I got caught up with moar work shennanigans and missed it. I also wanted to see the Git tutorial, but, well, moar work shannanigans…

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Friday’s keynote was packed with people eager to inventor of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee speak. His presentation had two key tenets; the first was the openness and power of the web, especially under HTML 5, and the second was the tragic suicide of anti-SOPA campaigner Aaron Swartz, who had been the target of prosecutors for several years for alleged breaches of copyright. Berners-Lee’s presentation style was non-linear – in many ways it was like trying to drink from a firehose. The main is clearly a genius, and his plethora of ideas took a lot of concentration to keep pace with. He is a staunch advocate of the openness and neutrality of the net – and in his words he summarised the issues down to

no spying, no blocking

I would have loved to have been a fly on the wall at his meeting with Julia Gillard. One wonders whether Stephen Conroy would offer him an audience.

In summary, linux.conf.au was a brilliant, tiring, exhausting, overwhelming, inspiring, demanding experience. And I can’t wait to do it all again in Perth next year.

NOTE: Videos from #lca2013 are going up on the mirror at the time of posting.

So, my talk proposal around LilyPad Arduino wasn’t accepted into the main track for linux.conf.au this year, but I was invited by Bianca and Robyn to submit it to the Haecksen Miniconf, where it was accepted.

Again, the talk slides were done in Inkscape with the Sozi extension.

The talk was well received and you can find the slides in a GitHub repo.

Thanks to Bianca and Robyn for the opportunity

Mårten Mickos – Open Source Cloud Platforms

Mårten Mickos of Eucalyptus opened day two with a presentation on open source cloud platforms. He opened by naming the big four open source cloud platforms – OpenNebula, OpenStack, CloudStack and Eucalyptus -  the ‘four beautiful open source sisters’. He drew further analogy by explaining that Starbucks is the public cloud – you know exactly what you can get, and that the home espresso machine you have on your bench is the private cloud. They serve different purposes.

He went on to explain the different types of cloud – public, private, hybrid, and mobile  – and asserted that everything will go mobile eventually – a prediction I wholeheartedly agree with. As a Eucalyptus rep, he was obviously outlining where Eucalyptus’ services sit, and he positioned them between the public cloud and data centre – where people might be making their first move from the data centre to the cloud, or in reverse where there are some services they wish to bring back in house.

Mickos’ stated that Eucalyptus understood the desire of developers to have their workloads liberated from the underpinning cloud platform – and to not be locked in to any one platform. This ability is scaring some hardware vendors, as increased core and node utilisation from leveraging cloud services means that less hardware is required.

Mickos went on to opine the four open cloud offerings were a source of better innovation through cross pollination – their competitive collaboration made each strive to be better. In conclusion, Mickos stated that the open cloud provides developers with freedom of environment, scale and deployment.

Monty Taylor – Growing an open source community

Taylor, of OpenStack fame, demonstrated how they grew their community through a fundamental commitment to openness. This starts from the basic belief that anyone can participate and contribute in the project, and that there is a sense of liberte, egalite and fraternite throughout. The freedom of the project also needs to be assured through ascribing an appropriate license, and the governance models and process of the project also need to be egalitarian. While a benevolent dictator (in the form of an individual or a large corporate sponsor) may seem like a positive thing, this can be offputting for meritorious contributors. Taylor explained how open, participative design summits – copied from the Ubuntu model – were also used to help cohesion within the community. He further explained that the repositories for a project also need to be transparent and open, and that code reviews were necessary to ensure quality, but they also needed to be transparent and open in nature.

The key takeaway here was that in order to grow a community in opensource, everything about it needs to be open – the code, the governance, the processes, the contributions etc.

Matt Asay – Picking the next black swan in open source

Matt Asay, who works with 10gen (a mongoDB company), presented on how to pick the next ‘winners’ of open source. He opened by sharing some of the biggest ‘black swan’ events of the past 40 years – such as ‘no one will every need more than 640kb of RAM’ – and highlighting that it’s difficult to predict the future.

One key principle that’s often employed is to ‘follow the money’, but Asay demonstrated that this is not always true. In open source, in contrast with the commercial sector, money and profits are not always a harbinger of success. Some open source companies make massive technical breakthroughs without being financial successes.

Instead, he encouraged those interested to observe the user and developer ratios of projects – and quoted a figure that for every 1000 users, there are 10 bug reporters – and one developer. So the ratios are important.

Other factors to consider when picking open source winners included whether the project was prepared for participation by having assets such as documentation, modularity, accessibility to code and to knowledge of the project, a solid codebase and a license to fit the need. Where the code was hosted was another factor, and Asay highlighted how the market dominance of SourceForge and SVN was being usurped in recent times by GitHub.

He also encouraged us to follow the developers and the data – as big data is getting bigger all the time, with technologies such as Hadoop, NoSQL and analytics having a larger role to play int he future. Big data is big on processing, and big on storage, and this has forced companies such as Google, Facebook (viz. Cassandra) and Amazon to write their own stuff – big data was the driver. From there it was not a massive leap to show how to pick open source winners by following job market trends. Buzzwords such as HTML5, iOS, Android, Puppet, Hadoop et all weren’t even invented 2-3 years ago.

He concluded by stating that in open source, we build what matters. We innovate in technology – and open source is focussed on big issues – not – for example’s sake – on finding ways to get people to click more advertisements.

Imad Sousou – Linux at Intel

Sousou opened with an explanation of Moore’s Law, and how it has more or less held true for the last forty years. He then applied the law to the automotive sector – and if a VW Beetle followed Moore’s Law, it would go at over 300,000 km/h and run for 5cents a week! The type of constant innovation that allows to evolve at such a rapid pace takes a lot of dedication, commitment – and investment.

Sousou demonstrated how Intel had played a key role in Linux communication and many open source projects such as Wayland, dLeyna and many others, with the overriding theme being the development of apps in web technologies. Here, two challenges are still present – API completeness and performance. The W3C APIs simply don’t cover what an application needs to do, so Intel have helped create the System Application working gorup within the W3C to improve this. They are also working on web technologies performance, to help improve things like fluid animation. Their investment in automotive Linux is also to be noted – and one wonders whether it will be long before we have Linux not just in the the desktop, the data centre and in our mobile devices, but also under the bonnet.

Ralf Flaxa – Enterprise Linux Evolution

Flaza, VP Engineering at SuSE opened by stating that he didn’t want to give us the standard sales pitch. Instead, he told us a story of how he became involved in Linux – and it was all because he wanted a serial driver. From his first Linux Kongress in 1994, he still feels the sense of collaboration and community, even though many members of the Linux ‘family’ are now his direct competitors.

Much of his talk echoes previously covered themes – such as what it means to be ‘open’. To be truly open means being open in many ways – open source, open licence, open community, open governance, open repositories, open to invite the competition and open to contribution.

He gave a number of hints on how to achieve this such as

• grant influence only to contributors
• welcome contribution in any form – documentation, code, money, testing
• encourage beginners and lower the barrier to entry
• remember to give credit and recognition
• strive for the best possible code base
• keep things simple by modularising them and breaking them down into digestible bits

Conference Drinks sponsored by Intel at Casa Battló