| Wednesday, July 25 |
In a highly competitive market, with a lot at stake, developing consensus as well as running code can be difficult. Industry consortia and business models may determine how the future of the Internet gets decided - and who makes those decisions. Cisco Fellow Fred Baker will talk about the challenges that will shape the Internet, and whether Open Source will play as big a role as it has in the past.
How important is open source to the future of the Internet? The Internet evolved as it did because of open source software and open standards. The spirit of open source is best expressed by the Internet Engineering Task Force, which operates on the basis of "rough consensus and running code." However, today's Internet is not the playground it was a decade ago. While some applications, like Napster and AIM, use the open Internet effectively, the sacrifice of the end-to-end model makes deployment of innovative applications challenging. The introduction of so-called "middle boxes" - firewalls, translators, caches, and application layer gateways - means that the new applications must actively circumvent these, or must gain their cooperation.
Sponsored by
This infrastructure was architected with a combination of Open Source and proprietary software. This presentation will discuss the challenges faced, both technical and political, when deploying OSS on such a large scale and the problems managed as the environment changes and grows.
The discussion covers the contrast between the OSS experience with that of proprietary closed source products in the same environment, the lessons learned from this experience, and how the OSS community can help make OSS a continued success.
Morgan Stanley has what is widely recognized as one of the best IT departments in the financial industry, and has built one of the worlds largest integrated and truly "Enterprise-wide" technology platforms for application deployment.
Sponsored by
In this talk we'll discuss why Perl is an important component in modern cancer research and show examples in finding the causes of disease.
Dave Stutz will speak about Microsoft's work on a shared source implementation of the common language elements of .NET.
The Mono project is a community initiative to develop an open source,
Linux-based version of the Microsoft .NET development platform. Its
objective is to enable Linux developers to build and deploy
cross-platform .NET Applications. The project will implement various
technologies developed by Microsoft that have now been submitted to
the ECMA for standardization.
Attend, and hear about the latest progress in the C# compiler, Virtual
Execution System, class library, CIL GCC frontend, and visual
development tools.
openadaptor is a 100% Java/XML-based software platform that allows for rapid business system integration with little or no custom programming. openadaptor can be loosely classified as EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) software. It is highly extensible and provides many ready-built interface components for JMS, Oracle, Sybase, TIBCO, as well as data exchange formats such as XML.
Many things happen when a long-time open source project is converted into a commercial model. Some of these events are business oriented and expected: for example, marketing and sales departments appear. Some are less obvious, involving sometimes subtle changes in the way engineering is done.
The open source sendmail MTA has been the major MTA on the Internet since TCP/IP was released with Berkeley Unix as part of the conversion from the ARPAnet to the Internet in 1982. In 1998, as sendmail neared a "success disaster" (where the success of the project outstrips the ability of the development team to support it), a commercial company was formed to develop and support sendmail.
In this talk, I will explore some of the differences between sendmail when it was a pure open source development project versus as a commercially sponsored product. The focus will be on how engineering has changed as opposed to examining the business model, but some of this talk will necessarily be business oriented rather than technology oriented.
Michael Cynn presents a case study of the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences web portal. Cynn discusses the portal development from clay model to full production and redesign/rewrite. He includes usage statistics, development procedures, architecture, specific technologies including object oriented perl5, mod_perl, Apache, server-side authentication, caching content and 'web scrapings', and incorporation of 3rd party commercial code into the existing structure. He also details the developmental as well as political/administrative obstacles.
| Thursday, July 26 |
Mundie set off a far-reaching discussion recently when he introduced Microsoft's Shared Source program, which blends access to source code with the preservation of strong intellectual property rights by software developers, and contrasted Shared Source to Open Source and the GNU General Public License.
There's been a strong response from the open source and free software communities, accusing Microsoft of trying to co-opt the momentum of open source with a program that offers superficial similarities, but few of the real benefits. Microsoft counters that they are trying to find a balance between the needs of commercial developers and the lessons learned from the open source movement.
Mundie will discuss ways in which Shared Source differs from Open Source, and why Microsoft believes that the Shared Source Philosophy supports a strong software business case for commercial software developers and their customers.
Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann will then discuss the industry's experience with open source vs. pseudo-open licensing, and why he believes that the future will favor stronger (rather than weaker) licenses to protect choice for users and freedom for developers.
His speech will be followed by a panel discussion with Tiemann, Mundie, and other experts on intellectual property and the software industry including,
Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie and Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann set the stage for a wide-open panel discussion about Microsoft's Shared Source program and the response from the open source community, when they square off in this shared source vs. open source debate.
Tim O'Reilly will moderate the panel.
| Friday, July 27 |
If you talk to CTOs, their biggest concerns aren’t whether to use commercial software or open source software but a set of large-scale problems that don’t yet have obvious solutions. Oracle may not have solutions for them, but neither does Open Source. Our panel of top CTOs will tell us about enterprise-class problems that they are worried about solving into the future.
This session explores the creation of an Open Service from simple URL-line parameters to comprehensive and flexible API and full-blown Web Service with XML-RPC and SOAP interfaces.
Meerkat is an Open Wire Service aggregating RSS feeds, an XML specification used for distributing news, product announcements, discussion threads, and other assorted content and metadata as channels. Meerkat provides various interfaces to its aggregated data-store, including a Web-based reader, various output "flavors," and Web Service back-ends.
Topics include design decisions, good and bad, exposing a Weblication's innards, effective API development, the importance of documentation, enabling derived services and applications, and an array of technologies and formats involved: PHP, Perl, XML, RSS, XML-RPC, SOAP (SOAP::Lite), JavaScript, MySQL, and more.
Trying to find out about a Linux problem can be an extensive exercise in
Web searching. What if a facility existed that would allow you to ask for
information that specifically related to your Linux problem? What if your
query for this information resulted in a real-time search, not a query of
web-crawled data? Furthermore, what if you didn't have to know where to
look for the facility that could give you this information? Sounds good,
doesn't it?
We are proposing a project to utilize peer-to-peer searching, combined with
repositories of Linux problem information, that would allow the average
Linux user access to vast, real-time information about Linux problems. This
facility would allow for fast, pertinent, keyword-based searching to find
out whether others have had the same problem. If there are reports of the
same problem, this facility would then help users find information on how
to fix or work-around the problem. To help bring about this new tool for
Linux users, we are building upon the existing open source Gnutella
implementations and extending that protocol to allow for real-time queries
across a vast number of problem data repositories.
Spam and malware are the banes of every e-mail user's existence. Fortunately, a properly configured mail server running BSD (or any other UNIX-like operating system) can protect users, including those running other operating systems on their client machines, from these nuisances while rejecting virtually no legitimate traffic. This tutorial describes how to configure systems running BSD and Sendmail (the techniques are also applicable to other, similar environments) to use DNS blacklists, mail "sanitizing" scripts, daemons that watch logs for evidence of spamming and "mail bombing," and similar utilities. We also discuss strategies for prevention of unauthorized relaying and blocking of outbound spam. Detailed are countermeasures against address harvesting and privacy invasion techniques such as "Rumplestiltskin" attacks, fingerd scans, tracking via identd, e-mail cookies, and malicious image tags in HTML mail. We finally provide links to source materials and relevant software tools. This updated paper, first presented to rave reviews at BSDCon, expands to encompass the current state of the art.
Red Hat Database is the first comprehensive data and transaction management solution from the established leader in open source computing. Red Hat Database manages critical business data in e-business applications, keeps support costs under control, and efficiently helps businesses grow without overly complex, expensive, enterprise systems. It features the latest release of PostgreSQL, the leading open source database, integrated, tested, and optimized for Red Hat Linux 7.1. Red Hat Database is specifically designed to enable more efficient business growth, such as Web and e-business deployments requiring quick implementation by organizations with little database expertise.
Imagine this: You're driving about town in your car. You pull up to
a stop light. The person in the next car is listening to a song by one
of your favorite bands, on MP3. When you pull away from the light, you
are listening to the same song in your own car.
How would this work? Erle & Flickenger believe it is possible to build
portable, anonymous, wireless, peer-to-peer file sharing networks, by
gluing together off-the-shelf technologies such as 802.11b, IP
networking, HTTP services, and ordinary notebook PCs. Using
application-specific software, peers can advertise their presence on a
common, private, wireless IP subnet. Peers can then negotiate file
transfers, based on user preferences, on a wholly unattended basis.
The session will demonstrate a proof-of-concept implementation of this
technology. It will discuss potential further developments, as well
as inherent limitations of the component technologies. It will briefly
touch on implications of anonymous wireless file sharing for censorship
and copyright enforcement.