| 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
| 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.
The advent of the open source relational database has dramatically changed the method of storing and retrieving information for web based applications. This presentation focuses on applications that utilize PostgreSQL for this purpose. One application, originally written in all flat files, migrated to dbm style hash databases for access speed, and then to an SQL based data implementation for flexibility, and now on to PostgreSQL for both. Other applications are implemented with PostgreSQL and other Open Source software throughout.
This presentation considers porting intermediate and advanced applications from Oracle to PostgreSQL, including data types, complex queries and stored procedures. OpenACS 4.1, the next generation version of OpenACS, is described and demonstrated, including how it makes specific use of advanced PostgreSQL features.
Many enterprise businesses today are considering a migration to open source solutions like PostgreSQL from proprietary platforms, but they want to know what tools are available to administer the database environment. This session provides an in-depth demonstration of the various tools available within the PostgreSQL environment. The session covers several Administrative Tools including PgAccess, phpPgAdmin, and PgAdmin, and a brief overview of the strengths and weaknesses of the tools, along with an interactive demo of the tools. Discussed are administrative Functions like maintaining database users and privileges, creating/modifying database objects, and performing import/export tasks. Demonstrated are several unique features that extend the capabilities of these tools.
Gedafe (the Generic Database Front-end) is a web-based database front-end that is database-application independent. That means that the (perl) code doesn't contain any information about what tables are present in the database, how the data is organized or how the forms should be made.
The idea is to put all the application logic in the database along with meta-information on how to present the data and then use a generic front-end that gathers that information and uses it to build the interface presented to the user.
At the moment Gedafe works only with PostgreSQL.
| 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.
