Notes from the conference FOSDEM '08

Introduction

So, this year I once again (February 23-24) managed to visit
FOSDEM - Free Open Software Developers European Meeting.
This event is held annually at the end of February at the Free University in Brussels.
Like last time , I will not go into the technical details of the reports, just try to convey the atmosphere of the conference. If you want to look through slides or watch videos of speeches, then you can find it on the official fosdem site .


This time I focused more on reports that were interesting to me, so I can’t tell you more than what I saw and heard myself.
It was interesting for me to listen to people who work with FreeBSD and parallel systems (clusters and other HPC), so I spent most of my time in the * BSD user group room.

Saturday

After the traditional Friday Beer Party (Belgian beer is just music!), On Saturday morning we were at the opening of the conference, which is traditionally held in the Janson audience. After the introductory word of the FOSDEM committee, the turn of the first report came - “Linux in Hollywood”. Everything was funny until someone asked the speaker what free software was used in Hollywood. In addition to Linux itself, he found it difficult to name anything (ffmpeg does not count). Hall grumbled :)
But what can you do, it is a truth of life - serious video processing at this time is provided only by paid packages.

<img src = "https://habrastorage.org/getpro/geektimes/post_images/c13/037/eec/c13037eec0c9d35cf86639a0138a7576.jpg" />	FreeBSD Project Server
<img src = "https://habrastorage.org/getpro/geektimes/post_images/efc/dc2/ace/efcdc2ace79a0b1c0508d801a8605c14.jpg" />	Explanations for various development branches
<img src = "https://habrastorage.org/getpro/geektimes/post_images/21e/d01/a8c/21ed01a8c399d15f366a07515a1f002f.jpg" />	FreeBSD ecosystem
<img src = "https://habrastorage.org/getpro/geektimes/post_images/f77/975/16d/f7797516df5ba5bb492e2b5a9a74896d.jpg" />	Schedule of distribution of project participants by age
<img src = "https://habrastorage.org/getpro/geektimes/post_images/b94/27d/f57/b9427df57001825acfbdc9c8c064f949.jpg" />	World map where developers are located

However, the most interesting thing started after that. I must say, I am very pleased with the increase in BSD-related content every year. This year, one of the first speakers at the conference was Robert Watson himself, a security officer from the FreeBSD core team! And the topic of his report (“How a large scale open source project works”) is in my opinion very relevant - he talked about how the development of the FreeBSD project is organized. Well-coordinated work of thousands of people, multi-level quality control, discussion of new features, resolution of emerging disputes between developers - this allows you to create a high-quality operating system without which the current Internet is unthinkable.
I remember the speech of Alan Cox, the core maintainer of the Linux kernel, which I listened to a couple of years ago. He then praised the organization of work in the FreeBSD team very much, complained that with each version he had to rake the code, patch it. Then, in his report, he talked about isolation of commits into different branches so that new pieces of code first passed integration tests and then only got into the stable version as the FreeBSD guys do . In conversations on the sidelines, many complained that yes, they say, you have to constantly monitor new versions of the kernel and update them promptly.
Well, okay, I do not want to argue that it is better - everyone chooses for himself. It only seems to me that * BSD systems are not well known to the general public, and such reports are very necessary for all of us. By the way, Robert Watson spoke at the largest audience that is available at FOSDEMe and the hall was completely packed - people even sat on the steps in the aisles.
')
The next report, Status Update of Software Patents, was a bit sad - the situation is getting worse every year. In America, patenting has become the main brake on the ubiquity of innovative technologies, patent barriers are everywhere and the IT industry is suffering from this. Fortunately, the situation in Europe is a little better, but large companies are lobbying heavily for their interests. The speaker is a lawyer by profession, he and his colleagues defend the interests of the Open Source Community and was very pessimistic. Without the support of governments and without explaining the harm of patents, it will be very difficult to combat these barriers.

After lunch, I went to listen to the opening of the FreeBSD Developer Room. Since the guys from Berkeley do not only the unix system, but also PostgreSQL, they did their reports in the AW package. It was convenient, besides, the postgresovtsy recently released a seriously reworked version of their database.
The first report was devoted to this event - the innovations and improvements of the existing functionality were listed. The main thing in the new version is a completely redesigned engine, which has now become much more productive.

This was followed by a report on the new version of FreeBSD 7.0, but I myself was aware of all its innovations as I am closely following its development and upgraded the day before. Therefore, I succumbed to the entreaties of friends and went to listen to Andrei Zmiyevsky with his "Unicoding with PHP6". In general, there is nothing special except the full support of Unicode in the new version, the entire report was about how it would be great to write on a fluff without different crutches. For some reason, it seemed to me that Andrei was somehow removed, "far from the audience," his report "did not cling." There was a feeling that he did not care for this project, that he just came to report on the work. By the way, I noticed a few guys from the RoR-community, they sat quietly and only occasionally looked at each other smilingly :) They did not ask questions ...

As I was told, the previous report "Perl 6" was also boring - the developers completely changed the syntax of the pearl without adding anything significant in essence. On the sidelines, it was discussed how it will now be difficult to rewrite everything for a new version - as you know, Pearl is a hard-to-read language, it will be very difficult to understand the implemented functionality and reproduce the same that works in the new version. In general, there was a lot of criticism of Patrick (speaker). He justified himself, he even specially emphasized that he “only realized what the community approved.” The new syntax is by the way something, look like if there is time, there are very interesting things.
Patrick paid special attention in the report to Parrot - an interesting thing, which makes it easy to make interpreters of new languages ​​using the bnf scheme.

In general, after PHP6, I could not stand it and returned to * BSD & PgSQL talks. There we were just finishing discussing the status of SNMP in FreeBSD (as I understand, things are going well). This was followed by a report describing in detail the progress in increasing the speed of the postgres server. Although I have already read all this and it has already been discussed in many places in the internet, it was interesting to know the details, due to which the performance was improved. This is basically a greater engine predictability and smarter management of disk I / O operations.

Next, it should have been the most interesting - “SWOT Analysis between PostgreSQL and MySQL”. Hall huddled to the eyeballs. I must say that there were a lot of people from MySQL and a few people from Sun at the conference. Last year, Sun’s vice-president for open-source technologies Simon Phillips spoke with his report “Liberating Java”. This year I saw him on the sidelines, besides there was a traditional booth OpenSolaris and as you know, Sun is one of the sponsors of FOSDEM. Now add to this the fact that Sun recently acquired MySQL. Represent now what interest was in this report from both sides?
On the one hand, PostgreSQL is BSD-licensed and, on the other, it is still free, but with a powerful corporate patron MySQL.
In short, an aunt came out before us and said that the report was being postponed to Sunday. After a couple of minutes the hall was almost empty ...
In general, it was not very interesting further and I decided to take a walk and take a look at the stands.

I must say, on FOSDEMe you can pass exams in Linux and FreeBSD administration. This is very convenient, since otherwise it is rather difficult to settle various organizational issues.

So ended the first day of the conference.

Sunday

On Sunday, I first became interested in project building systems and went to listen to a report on Hudson. The report was short, just half an hour, during which the speaker described how this toolkit is configured and “how it works great afterwards”. I didn’t hear out until the end, since Postgres Future Directions started at 10:30 and I ran there.

There, Bruce Momjlan talked excitingly about various new ideas that the post-grese people would like to implement in future versions. He admitted that of course everything will not be able to be implemented with the next version, but nevertheless, the storage device will be improved in 8.4 and the indexes and some built-in functions will be optimized. In the future, they will improve clustering (here I think you can even take part) and replication.
You know, but I really liked how Bruce told all this, he is so passionate about this project! He has that spark in his eyes, he spoke not on a slide, but from the heart, it seemed that his ideas were born right here. I am very happy for this project, it is in the right hands and these guys know what they are doing. In the end, of course, he tore applause :)

Next came Magnus, talking about how they ported PostgreSQL to the Win32 platform in native mode. Well, of course, it was about fork (), shared memory, I / O, and so on - a typical set of problems when porting. For a long time, they lagged behind the main development branch, but gradually caught up with it and integrated their work in it. Surprisingly, at some point they had better performance than the unix version. By the way, I did not know that the main system under which PostgreSQL is developed is FreeBSD. I don’t remember who, but one of the speakers said the day before that FreeBSD is their main workhorse. And although they do not sharpen the code specifically for it, nevertheless it was argued that the postgres are best turned on the frame. That's it.
Of course, the speaker was asked why they started porting to the proprietary system, to which he said that this would significantly expand the number of people using this wonderful database. It's hard not to agree.

The next 15-minute talk was about “Ruby on Rails on FreeBSD with PostgreSQL”. Well, there was nothing extra-single for me, I myself configured this bundle a year ago, even with Apache I checked it for hosting. Everything just works, nothing special.
Then there was a small talk about “DBI-Link 3.0” - this is Perl-binding for PostgreSQL, also useful to know.
Next was the “New Enterprise Features in PostgreSQL” where various backup, nested transaction management and other features were described.

After lunch there was an interesting systematic report about the GNU autotools: autoconf, automake, libtool etc. Indeed, such things are very important because they allow you to standardize the assembly of open projects and get rid of the solution of many already solved problems. The speaker categorically asked to use only autotools and not reinvent the wheel every time. “Do not even think about creating something similar to autotools, most likely you just can not do it, but spend a lot of energy in vain. Better take our tools and focus on the idea that you are going to implement . " He also told how he once raked someone’s project that was half in autotools, half in anarchy. He brought in pearls of programming - it turns out that many people are trying to use autotools without fully understanding how it works. In general, although I use it in my work, but I wanted to refresh my ideas about it. Now I have downloaded the manual for these things, I re-read it, find out the new details, enlighten :)

The next report was about full-text search on the postgres site. It turns out that if you properly apply already implemented things, then it all works very quickly. And of course you need to carefully consider what to index.
I certainly understand that such things as DBSight (based on Lucene) are more versatile, but as the example of the same Sphinx shows, specialized solutions make it possible to achieve better. There was nothing extra-single in the report, just an example of the correct approach to solving the problem using the PostgreSQL standard functionality.

The last thing I managed to listen to at this time was a report about the implementation of “Two-Phase Commit with PostgreSQL”, which was implemented in version 8.1. Of course, this has long existed in many commercial databases, but the fact that it is in postgrese puts it on par with them.
Here my attention was attracted not so much by the report, but by those who sat down next to me ... Robert Watson! Of course I wanted to talk with him closer.

I must say, he seemed younger to me than in the photo, which looks younger than 30 years. He has a 15 ″ MacBook Pro with Tiger (I’ve got a blind eye, since I myself am sitting at a MacBook and recently moved to a leopard, I see the difference right away). True, Robert practically does not use native “poppy” applications (perhaps except Safari) - I noticed several terminals with ssh-sessions in which he watches mail through Pine, chatting in IRC with the help of something text and of course compiles something into eterm in text Emacs :) Eh, but it turns out that we are somewhat similar ...
I don’t remember whether I said or not, but on FOSDEMe there are several Wi-Fi access points in every building. Free naturally, so many are sitting with their laptops and something there "hachat" all the time.
I didn’t distract him much, and I also had to listen to the report, he told me that he was already released, he didn’t replicate it even on all the mirrors, he advised cvsup-reliability on Monday or later.
( UPD: indeed, the source was only tagged with the 26th tag, I already
updated).

miscellanea

After that, I went to look for my comrades because I had to get ready to go back home. We bought a few books (O'Reily, also sponsors of the conference) and once again walked past the stands. There were already fewer people - many had left.
<img
src = "https://habrastorage.org/getpro/geektimes/post_images/4c1/730/78d/4c173078d95505748160d5c6c60fa505.jpg" />
There were a few dozen people who exchanged PGP keys. This is the traditional Key Signing Party, where people show their passport and exchange their public key with a partner. This year for the first time there was also the exchange of SSL certificates, but as I read, Open CA is not yet recognized by serious organizations, they need to be certified in order to become a full-fledged certificate authority. However, now you can register the Open CA public certificate on your computer and use encrypted content with a certain degree of security. By the way, Open CA is supported in almost all open web browsers. Therefore, you can, for example, create your own certificate and sign it with Open CA to make the encrypted content available on your web server. The user will not see any warning messages about the “self-signed certificate” as if your certificate was signed by Verisign itself, for example.

A little about the atmosphere of the conference.
As usual, several strong user groups were present - Debian, CentOS, Jabber, KDE, Gnome, PostgreSQL, * BSD, OpenSolaris, Gentoo (although they were completely blown away this year). There was a stand with embedded devices, although it seemed to me that there was nothing new in comparison with the previous year. For the first time, Mozill members were massively presented - and their badges lay there in bulk, and they handed out posters, and sold them tenderly :) * BSD and so on were more represented - they even had two big stands this time. Accordingly, there were significantly more people from PostgreSQL, the stand was also visible from afar - both the blue elephant, and badges, and shade (I bought myself one, could not resist), and they had books-disks. The KDE and Gnome stands were close to each other, on the contrary - the traditional bulletin board on the wall with a bunch of affixed post-it-FOR and against. People were jostling around and discussing things there.

<img
src = "https://habrastorage.org/getpro/geektimes/post_images/c85/65d/210/c8565d210113443c89b215bfcce96db1.jpg" />
According to my observations, about 60% of visitors are regular users interested in open source. Of the rest - about half of the coohakers, who often try to stand out with all sorts of wicked T-shirts, laptops, etc., the rest are people who actually participate in the development of open projects or representatives of companies that seriously use open source projects.

It seems to me that this year the stands were less popular than the talk rooms. It pleases, it means that more and more this event serves to exchange views and to spread ideas. It was Google again, but very imperceptibly, it had no stand at all, but it sponsored the event. If only Sun would take an example from him, otherwise it overshadows many projects with himself ...

I didn’t really like the choice of books from O'Reily this year, I lacked something solid, eternal (like Straustrup for example). There were a lot of one-day books, which for the most part are repeated manuals and which therefore do not want to buy.

I liked the choice of beer in the cafeteria, here the organizers make progress, well done. To whom both, but I remained faithful to my beloved Kriek. Maybe it would be better to open a second cafeteria somewhere nearby, or else people will get bigger and you will have to stand in a long line at half-time to buy your sandwich. My friends and I eventually ate at a restaurant nearby, but this is already more expensive and longer.

Oh yeah, those who read my previous report will remember that girl in a short skirt who comes to FOSDEM every year. So, we saw her this year again, though she was with a guy this time :) Well, okay ...

These are the impressions.

28 Feb 2008