[ossig] FOSS.in (Project Day 2) reports

[Ditesh Kumar]

(for full linkage, please visit:
http://ditesh.gathani.org/blog/2007/12/07/fossin-project-day-2-day-2/ )

Here is a report of FOSS.in Project Day 2 (day 1 report is available
here):

--- Fedora: Freedom is a Feature

Rahul Sundaram spoke on the importance of Freedom (as in free speech).
He gave a great example that insisting on Freedom drives innovation and
interoperatibility, as in the case where SUN opened up the Java platform
(as Simon Phipps wanted it to run on Debian and Fedora as a first class
package and insistence by Fedora and Debian on the issue of Freedom
worked towards them opening up the platform).

Rahul also indicated that Free software is a developer magnet and good
for end users. One good benefit in this regard (given that the dynamics
of Free Software is different from proprietary software) are time based
releases (Release is more important then features) which allow for
quicker development and an iterative development cycle. When considering
that Fedora pushes pushes patches and problems upstream, this allows for
code quality of packages in Fedora to improve much quickly compared to
proprietary software.

At this point, Rahul notes that OLPC runs a modified version of
Fedora :)

>From a user perspective, the Freedom from being able to modify Fedora
allows for innovation to fit user requirements. He showed us Vixta, a
fork of Fedora, which looks very much like Microsoft Windows Vista,
except that looks like Windows. The point here being that the right to
freedom allowed for innovation that may end up benefiting the end user.

There was a discusson about the freedom to fork: it keeps Fedora honest,
it allows user generated innovation, it provides transparency, it builds
diversity in the software ecosystem, and perhaps most importantly, it
serves as a preemptive strike against proprietary vendor tactics.

Next up was a discussion on features vs integration. Some cases where
Free software facilitates integration include FUNC (Fedora Unified
Network Controller), Smolt (Metrics, hardware profiles, hardware
compatibility), SElinux, Exec-shield and virtualization all indicate
areas where free software is leading innovation.

Impressive localization statistics were presented:

      * 2000 translators
      * 65 projects
      * 70 languages
      * 4 million characters

Of course, such localization success could only be possible through
Freedom that the distribution provides.

On questions from the audience, Rahul mentioned that Fedora has no
certification involved so in the case where scientific applications are
not supported, getting involved with the Fedora community will get
problems solved relatively quickly. On another question of Anaconda (the
Fedora installer) not showing diskspace in Fedora, Rahul simply asked
the questioner to file a bug in BugZilla. Heh :)

Personal thoughts: Good talk, I am a strong believer in Freedom (as in
free speech) and the fact that Fedora keeps its ideals strong is a
continuing reason for me to use the distribution. Rock on, guys!

--- OpenOffice.org programmability – at a glance

Juergen Schmidt of Sun Microsystems spoke about having extensions lower
the entrance barrier for developers (extensions being encapsulated mini
projects). He then started talking about UNO being a component model
(better then RMI/DCOM/CORBA). UNO was started in 1997 as no sufficient
component technology was available then.

UNO is touted as being language independent with its API being defined
in UNOIDL. UNO supports inter-process communication (remotely even) with
remote transparency and perhaps most importantly, it is independent from
office (look up URE, the UNO runtime environment).

UNO has no or minimal code generation, with only type definitions (for
example, interfaces and abstract classes in C++, normal Java interfaces
in Java). Implementations are exchangeable, multi-threaded, with Unicode
and error handling.

Jeurgen mentioned that the design goal is to have one API for everything
internally for better modularization, allow for macros, remote
automation, to be able to exchange or modify components and extend
functionality by new components (extensions).

Extensions effectively extend office functionality and future work in
this area is to allow online updates via HTTPS in OO.o 2.4, digital
signatures support, license support (simple EULA’s), and to support
extensions repository and online accessbility features.

Some future plans in the area of programatic extensions include
extendable help, allowing for semi-automatic updates, automatic
notification about updates, provide information about new extensions
(from a repository), GUI redesign, bundled extensions, improved NetBeans
and more UNO AWT controls.

In the area of UI integration, it is possible via XML configuration
(which is clearly context dependent only, for example in Writer or Calc
only). Top level menus/toolbars, merging existing menus and/or
toolsbars, internationalization support, supporting in OO.o API plugin
for NetBeans.

Personal thoughts: While Juergen presented well on the programmatic
aspects of OpenOffice.org, I was expecting more code on screen. No
matter, later on in the day, there was code to be seen!

--- Fedora architectures

Tom “spot” Callaway from RedHat spoke about architectures that Fedora
supports. He gave the example of Aurora Sparc Linux which takes the
RedHat source tree, removes the trademark, compiles the packages and
puts it back online.

In Fedora, three architectures are supported (x86, x86_64 and PPC). The
PPC userbase is small, so instead of Fedora deciding to dropping the PPC
architecture, they decided instead to create and support Secondary
Architectures.

Tom defined a primary architecture as an architecture as one that has a
majority of users (x86, x86_64, PPC). On primary architectures, build
failures are fatal. A secondary architecture, in comparison, have
motivated maintainer teams and build hardware (SPARC, alpha, ia64, ARM,
s390) and build failures on secondary architectures are not fatal. If
packages build correctly, then they are pushed to the repositories. The
architectures are second only in number of users, not in quality.

Each secondary architecture is built and maintained by a team of
architecture maintainors. Each team will hae a lead, who is ultimately
responsible for Fedora on that architecture. Several communities exist
(alphacore - Fedora on alpha, Aurora Sparc Linux (Fedora on Sparc),
Fedora ia64)and- all officially can make a fedora release.

All packages must be generated from sources and the spec files are kept
in the Fedora CVS. Secondary arch maintainers get special access to the
Fedora CVS, so they can fix archecture specific bugs (”with great power
comes great responsibility”) :)

iSecondary arch usually take longer to build then primary architectures
and as such, milestones may be slightly delayed for secondary
architectures. Secondary architectures that repeatedly fail to meet
major milestones will be dropped.

Fedora does not currently have the available disk space to carry copies
of secondary architecture releases. As such, each secondary architecture
will have to provide their own storage and hosting for releases.
Secondary architecture torrents can be linked from the main fedora
torrent page, though.

Tom went on to show how contributors can start a secondary architecture:

Step 1: Form the architecture team
Step 2: Get hardware for the architecture
Step 3: Bootstrap the architecture
Step 4: Set up a Koji buildserver cluster
Step 5: Create a tracker bug in Fedora bugzilla
Step 6: Create a a mailing list
Step 7: Connect the architecture buildserver cluster to the primary
cluster
Step 8: Get cvs access for the architecture team, set milestones

Seems easy enough! :)

Personal thoughts: Since I use only x86, this talk was an eye opener!

--- Fedora Spin

Rahul Sundaram spoke on the diversity of distributions. The freedom to
fork allows for different tastes for distributions. There is not much to
comment on this talk as it was fairly basic and I did not take down too
many notes :)



-- 
  May your signals all trap                     Ditesh Kumar
May your references be bounded                ditesh at gathani.org
      All memory aligned                http://ditesh.gathani.org/blog
    Floats to ints rounded              http://www.openmalaysiablog.com