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00:00
Discrete element methodBoom (sailing)Context awarenessPower (physics)Video gameBitData managementExtension (kinesiology)Multiplication signProcess (computing)Point (geometry)Projective planeOpen sourceMereologyCommitment schemeSolid geometryXML
01:28
CodeRight anglePhysicalismMultiplication signPatch (Unix)Video gameCartesian coordinate systemCommitment schemeError messageComputer fileSoftware bugInternet forumMoment (mathematics)Traffic reportingDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Open sourceExtreme programmingContext awarenessBitMereologyCategory of beingNeuroinformatikDevice driverQuicksortDistribution (mathematics)SoftwareFreewareData managementSpeech synthesisPlastikkarteGroup actionCore dump1 (number)Digital photographySet (mathematics)Universe (mathematics)Server (computing)Point (geometry)Software developerReverse engineeringPresentation of a groupSpacetimeProcess (computing)Decision theoryArithmetic progressionCoefficient of determinationLine (geometry)Computer-assisted translationElectronic mailing listOpen setIn-System-ProgrammierungFocus (optics)Slide ruleSupersymmetry
10:11
Order (biology)Distribution (mathematics)Software maintenancePhysical systemProcess (computing)MereologyBinary codeBuildingOpen sourceCodeCoefficient of determinationEnterprise architectureBitLecture/Conference
11:29
Group actionQuicksortDistribution (mathematics)Enterprise architectureGeneric programmingDerivation (linguistics)BootingAsynchronous Transfer ModeOpen sourceComputer programmingPhysical systemLevel (video gaming)Server (computing)Speech synthesisOnline helpMereologyBuildingOperating systemMultiplication signGraphical user interfaceBitRoundness (object)CircleService (economics)Kernel (computing)Point (geometry)Different (Kate Ryan album)Software developerRevision controlOrder (biology)Computer fileOpen setProcess (computing)Right angleGoodness of fitReading (process)Natural languagePunched cardMetropolitan area networkAcoustic shadowSoftwareFitness function1 (number)Lecture/Conference
17:05
VirtualizationDifferent (Kate Ryan album)Data managementSoftwareOnline helpFreewareRight angleEndliche ModelltheorieSoftware developerOpen sourcePoint (geometry)Open setMultiplication signArithmetic meanQuicksortAbstractionEntire functionDevice driverGraphical user interface2 (number)DemosceneBootingReverse engineeringPower (physics)Server (computing)Distribution (mathematics)Image resolutionArithmetic progressionAlpha (investment)Core dumpFunctional (mathematics)Virtual machineMetropolitan area networkAcoustic shadowSpacetimeEnterprise architectureBuildingCycle (graph theory)System callShared memoryLecture/Conference
22:40
Open sourceProcess (computing)Axiom of choiceMereologyMessage passingSoftware development kitPhysical systemPulse (signal processing)SoftwareQuicksortBuildingSingle-precision floating-point formatBitTheoryCodePropositional formulaSpacetimeGreatest elementDrop (liquid)Point (geometry)Enterprise architectureCoefficient of determinationDistribution (mathematics)Special unitary groupMassSoftware developerFood energyCircleEntire functionSystem administratorSoftware industryDerivation (linguistics)Goodness of fitElectronic visual displayRight angleCountingWordSoftware testingOpen setNetzwerkverwaltungStreaming mediaRandom matrixBackupMultiplication signDisk read-and-write headClosed setCASE <Informatik>Lecture/Conference
29:57
Universe (mathematics)Sheaf (mathematics)Reading (process)Multiplication signType theoryOpen sourceCartesian coordinate systemAuthorizationQuicksortLimit (category theory)Process (computing)Channel capacityBuildingCycle (graph theory)AreaPoint (geometry)Server (computing)View (database)TheoryInstallation artMereologyBitEncryptionINTEGRALSoftware testingMiniDiscSeries (mathematics)Computer hardwareVector potentialGaussian eliminationNormal (geometry)Film editingFile systemBooting2 (number)Software bugSpacetimeAlpha (investment)Data centerPerspective (visual)WebsiteMessage passingOpen setAnalytic continuationAddress spaceRight angleSoftware development kitSoftwareField (computer science)Network topologyGoodness of fitLecture/Conference
37:13
Open setCartesian coordinate systemBand matrixDegree (graph theory)WindowRight angleInformation securityIntegrated development environmentBitPairwise comparisonFreewareCodeMereologyNumberEvent horizonMultiplication signPoint (geometry)Series (mathematics)Group actionProcess (computing)WikiSoftwareStack (abstract data type)WordBeta functionEntire functionPhysical systemSet (mathematics)VirtualizationPropositional formulaCommitment schemeVideo gameAcoustic shadowOpen setEnterprise architectureOrder (biology)Office suiteData managementMetropolitan area networkSocial classComputing platformInstance (computer science)Moment (mathematics)Perspective (visual)Key (cryptography)
44:29
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Transcript: English(auto-generated)
00:09
I think we'll go ahead and get started. The people who wander in late are going to miss the best talk of the day. So let me begin by introducing myself and laying out a little bit of context of how we're going to spend the next 45 minutes or so.
00:26
My name is Max Spivak. I work for Red Hat. I'm also a Fedora Project contributor. There are certain points during my talk today where I'm going to talk to you as a Fedora person and I will be standing as such. There are other times where I'm going to talk to you as a Red Hat employee.
00:42
I will walk over here and put my Fedora on and then you will know that I'm talking to you like a Red Hat salesperson. I've been working at Red Hat for about four and a half years. I spent two of those years as the Fedora Project leader.
01:02
I took over that role just before the release of Fedora 5 and continued in that role until just after the release of Fedora 9, almost exactly a year ago. For the past year, my job has been to manage Red Hat's global community team. That's a team of people who participate to a solid extent still in Fedora.
01:27
Also, part of what the community team at Red Hat tries to do is ensure that Fedora isn't the only example of Red Hat's commitment to open source. We work in other parts of the company as well.
01:41
However, this talk today is about Fedora and so that's what I'm going to focus on. Let's lay out a little bit of context because I found it interesting in Joe Brockmeyer's Open SUSI speech an hour ago. He put up a slide that talked about some of the large goals of the Open SUSI project.
02:07
One of those goals that he said was to make the easiest use desktop for anyone in Linux. The point I want to make here is that there's a whole bunch of people in the audience. If I were to ask each and every one of you what you use a Linux
02:22
distribution for or what you use Fedora for, I'm going to get a lot of different answers. That's fine because Fedora can serve a lot of different roles. Maybe you're using it in your ISP as a server farm. Maybe you're a university that's basing your custom distribution of Linux on Fedora.
02:41
Maybe you're an animation studio that's using Fedora to make movies that make hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars around the world. The project itself has to have a small set of goals that define both what it is and what it isn't.
03:00
So that as decisions get made and as resources get prioritized, you can make progress toward those specific things. Fedora, I think, is at a point in its life where what is important to it is increasing the size of the open source development community around the world.
03:23
We need distros and we need companies that want to spend a whole lot of money marketing Linux and getting as many new users into Linux as possible. I applaud folks like Ubuntu that seem to have done a great job with that. Fedora does not compete directly in that space.
03:42
I want you guys to picture a big giant reverse pyramid that represents the potential population of the open source community. At the very top of that pyramid, you've got a whole bunch of basic users who are simply consumers of a Linux distribution.
04:01
It doesn't matter which one it is. And then of all of those users, some percentage, and I would argue to you that it's a relatively high percentage, if they run into a problem, they're going to go onto Google or whatever and they're going to search for their error message and they're probably going to find some answers.
04:20
And they're going to solve their problem. Great. Until that moment in time, everything that user has done has made their computing experience easier only for them. There's a pretty big gap in this pyramid to the next step down which is the moment in time in which a user takes an action that turns them into a participant in a community.
04:47
And that gap is where Fedora is really trying to focus, in my opinion, right now. There's other Fedora contributors here, maybe they have different ideas, but I think that's kind of where we're focusing. So getting those users who are solving problems for themselves to do something as simple as file
05:06
a bug report or post a little how-to of how they've solved their problem on a forum, the moment that action gets taken, all of a sudden a user has become a participant. And that is the big gap that you have to achieve. And from there it becomes easier for people to go from being someone who files bugs to someone who submits patches.
05:26
And someone who submits patches to someone who wants to maintain packages, right? And then you've got people who are building infrastructure, writing new applications, developing new features, right? Once you make that first leap, it becomes so much easier to pull someone completely into the open source ecosystem.
05:42
Fedora strives to be the place where that kind of work can happen. And where people who want to fully engage in the apprenticeship that is open source development, right, can get into a community that allows them to succeed. We'll talk about that a little bit more in this presentation.
06:01
So I will very quickly say, when I introduce myself, you'll notice that nowhere in my introduction did I say that I am an incredibly smart technical person, right? So if you've got questions at any point in this speech, shout them out. If it's a technical question, I'm probably going to turn to Tom Callaway here, who's the Fedora engineering manager, or one of the crew in blue, and let them answer your question about exactly which kernel driver does blah blah and blah blah.
06:27
But feel free to shout out any questions or comments at any point in time. For the rest of this talk, I want to break it down into four categories. And these four categories are ones that were chosen carefully by our Fedora marketing team.
06:44
And we call them the four foundations of Fedora. Again, I didn't realize the room was as big as Wembley Stadium, but I've got some stickers here, and if you want a Fedora sticker, you can come to the Fedora booth and we'll give them to you. They say on them, freedom, friends, features, and first.
07:02
Those are the four foundations that we believe represent kind of the core philosophies that Fedora is built upon. So I want to talk a little bit about each of those four things, kind of say what it means to me, and then give some examples of what's going on in Fedora right now, or recent achievements in Fedora that relate to those four buckets.
07:22
And hopefully you'll find it interesting, and we'll go from there. The first one that I want to talk about is the Freedom Foundation, because I think that's the most important, right? We're all here because we believe very passionately in free software, and Fedora's commitment to free software, I
07:43
would argue to you, is among the strongest of all of the Linux distributions that are out there. And Red Hat's commitment to free software is that Red Hat recognizes that it is building its business around a giant community.
08:07
And if Red Hat wants to be able to look people in the eye and say, we are the leader of free software in the world, then Red Hat has to make the commitment to ensure that its participation in the free software community is genuine and honest and strong.
08:23
So we'll briefly talk about licenses, and Spot, you can jump in anytime if I say something wrong. Fedora is very active in making sure that all of the code that goes into its package, all of the packages that we put into the distro, and all of the upstreams that are building new code or contributing code to the
08:43
distro, we want to make sure that all the packages in Fedora have a free software foundation or OSI compliant license. And Spot himself spends a large amount of time working with upstreams that want to get code into Fedora or other distros where there are licensing problems, and tracking down the copyright holders, helping explain to them where there might be problems
09:06
in their licenses, and getting licenses changed so that the free software commons that everybody can draw from is as large as possible. That's all nice. I'm not really going to go into licensing too deeply here, but I wanted to make it clear
09:22
to anybody who doesn't know that Fedora holds a very strong line about free software, and we're very passionate about it. The more interesting aspect of this freedom foundation with regards to the Fedora distro as I see it is the manner in which our community participates in building the distribution.
09:47
If I had stood up here three years ago and tried to give this talk, it would have been littered with a to-do list of all of the reasons and all of the places where the Fedora distribution isn't as open and isn't as community-friendly as it needs to be.
10:01
But today, we can stand up in front of you and we can proudly state that about two-thirds of all the packages in the Fedora distribution are maintained by people in our volunteer community. Anybody in the world can be a maintainer or a co-maintainer of any package in Fedora.
10:24
All they have to do is be able to step up and do the work required to maintain and own that package, and they can do it. What's also interesting is that the release engineering processes and the infrastructure processes around Fedora have been specifically architected
10:42
over the last couple of years and re-architected in order to make the community engagement as vibrant as possible. Fedora is the perfect example of a distribution that eats all of its own dog food. The build system that we use to take our code and create source RPMs and take the source RPMs and create binary RPMs is completely open-sourced.
11:10
I guess Joe was kind of talking about the OpenSUSE build system a little bit. I'll talk about the Fedora one. It's called Koji. It was written in conjunction with some Red Hat employees and some community members.
11:24
We took the good parts of the Red Hat build system, the stuff that was generic, the stuff that wasn't needed for Red Hat Enterprise Linux. We streamlined it. We worked on it with our community. We added features. We built a new build system that anybody in the Fedora community can use. It was so good, in fact, that the circle goes round and round and Red Hat is able to take the Fedora build system that it
11:46
helped invest in building and over time replace more and more bits of the old crappy Red Hat Enterprise Linux build system so the ecosystem shows. I've got to go put my Red Hat on again.
12:04
By investing in the Fedora community and doing everything that we can to put the ability to innovate into the hands of the most passionate and most educated people in the world who care the most about it, Red Hat gets more efficiency in its own processes. Being a good citizen and a good contributor to the open source community repays Red Hat tenfold for its contributions.
12:29
Moving on from the build system, because Jeroen van Moyen is in the room and I like to embarrass him, is the system by which we actually compose the distribution. You've got to take a big pile of RPMs and create some sort of ISO out of it that can do something.
12:46
Again, we see the openness of the community really coming into play here because the main compose tool that Fedora uses is something called Punji. It has a nice API. Punji is great, by the way. Simple command line. You really almost don't have to know anything in order to successfully run it.
13:07
You just say build me a distro and you give it a kickstart file or a pile of packages and it will go ahead and do it. And that's what the Fedora release engineering team uses to build all of the different versions of Fedora that we release to the world.
13:21
But it's got a really nice API on it and it allows community guys like Jeroen and a group of people called the Fedora Unity Project who want to build upon that work to make a graphical interface on top of it. So someone who wants to just go through a wizard and build their own distribution can do it. A guy named Bill Nottingham, one of the most senior engineers at Red Hat and in the Fedora Project,
13:44
did a lot of work in taking all of the logos and the trademark issues around Fedora and getting all of the trademark and logo stuff into one package that can easily be removed and replaced with a generic package so that people who want to create downstream derivatives of Fedora can do so as trivially as possible.
14:03
Because all of the tools to build the distribution are open and because we've gone the extra additional step of making it very easy for people to rebrand and reuse the distribution and remix it without having to worry about legal and trademark issues, we see a very vibrant release engineering and custom engineering community building up within Fedora.
14:29
On the enterprise side, we see a group of people inside of Red Hat using
14:44
these ideas in a project called FinCrust that's sort of a Linux appliance building tool. I've now reached the level of my technical knowledge about it. But again, ideas that are happening in the community, ideas that came from the community that
15:03
we supported, bringing value back to the business, which allows us to continue to support the community. Well that's what I wanted to say about the freedom point. One fourth done. Any questions or comments? Anything anyone want to add from the Fedora world?
15:40
The next of the four foundations that I want to talk about is, we talked about freedom, now I want to talk about first.
15:46
And to me, first represents innovation. And it is the goal of Red Hat and the goal of Fedora to be the most innovative community in the open source development world. And we believe that we are. So this is the part of the speech where I might need some help from my friends.
16:09
I want to talk very briefly at a relatively high level about some of the technical advancements that are seen all over the open source ecosystem that have come from the Red Hat and Fedora community.
16:23
The first one I want to talk about is a new X server project called Wayland. This is relatively recent in the last, I don't know, maybe nine months or something like that. You see a lot of it in Fedora 10, if you've used Fedora 10. We've got a program in there when the operating system starts up, right after you see the BIOS.
16:45
There used to be a program called Red Hat graphical boot. It was the little Fedora logo and it would switch from all the different modes. As all your services start up, it would run down the whole thing. That's the old world. We replaced that in Fedora 10 with something called Plymouth, which takes advantage of the kernel mode setting feature that some of the newer chipsets have.
17:05
And Wayland, which is the X server that takes advantage of this, so that the entire boot process now is significantly faster, more streamlined. There's a feature in Fedora 10 and Fedora 11, it's a continuing project through the current two releases, of speeding up the boot cycle.
17:22
The goal, I think, for Fedora 11 is to get a 20-second startup. From turning on the power button to GDM, you're ready to log in, everything you need to go in 20 seconds. All of the development behind the scenes on Wayland is going into that. We're pretty confident that because we're doing that development openly, it's going to be something that benefits the entire free software community.
17:47
Another thing that Red Hat and Fedora have invested significantly in is development around the nouveau driver, the reverse engineering of the NVIDIA 3D drivers. And again, these are developments happening in the core functionality of Linux, right?
18:07
X, or I guess, would it be fair to say that it replaces X? I don't know. No, around X. That are going to benefit the entire community, right?
18:20
Red Hat and Fedora are leading the way here. We think that's a valuable thing to do. The other place that I think is a useful place to talk about, because we see it being used more and more in all of the infrastructures that different Linux distributions are rolling out, is virtualization. It's been a major thing for a long time, ever since VMware got us going years and years ago.
18:44
But the inevitability of open source, right, always said that VMware's proprietary model would eventually be replaced by an open source community, which can do these same things better and faster and for less money. And here we are in 2009, where we've got a progression, if you look at the
19:02
history of Fedora, from Fedora Core 4 all the way here to the alpha of Fedora 11, you've got a long progression of progress in the virtualization space, starting with the work that was done on Xen way back in the day, right? But let's all be honest, what's the leader in virtualization right now? It's KVM.
19:22
So what does the Fedora model make possible in something deeply technical like virtualization, where you've got different competing solutions even within the open source ecosystem? How does Fedora help, if you're a developer, how does Fedora help you make
19:41
sense of what's going on here and work with technology that changes very quickly? Well, Red Hat has invested a lot of its own engineering resources and built community around various virtualization projects like LibVirt, which tries to consolidate a lot of the virtualization calls that need to be made into a basic API.
20:01
VertManager, which begins to give you a graphical interface to use and manage different virtual machines, right? And moving on even further, in the recent history, we're starting to see in the Fedora project, a project called Fedora Cumulus, which begins to take advantage of the virtualization technology that exists and build sort of an infrastructure cloud,
20:27
which we're going to use both in building the Fedora distro so we can make it available to a huge community of hundreds and hundreds of people who are building thousands and thousands of packages. We can manage all of this stuff, and because it's been built with an abstraction layer on top of it, right?
20:45
As certain people go and use KVM, we're capable of supporting that. As certain people go and use Xen, we're capable of supporting that. And I've got to put my hat on. The value for Shadowman is that you've got a huge community of developers
21:01
who are playing around with these competing virtualization technologies, who are helping to ensure that the manner in which Red Hat is building APIs and general means of using virtualization is sane, makes sense, and can support something as robust as the Fedora infrastructure.
21:22
So that by the time we take all of this virtualization technology and stick it into Red Hat Enterprise Linux, at which point in time we're committed to support it for seven years, we're so much further down the road of knowing that it's stable, that people want to use it, that the engineers who work for our customers aren't going to look at their managers and say, who bought this crap, right?
21:41
It's going to be something that our customers are able to use and that we're capable of supporting. In the Fedora space, however, what's exciting if you're a developer is that you've got a six-month release cycle, right? In the United States last year, you might have heard we had a presidential election.
22:02
Over a billion dollars was spent by two guys campaigning over the course of, I don't know, it took them three years, right? So that one person could get elected president. In Fedora, we have a technical election every six months, right?
22:20
Every time we throw out a new distribution of Fedora, everything is kind of up for grabs, right? And it's a chance to look around the open source ecosystem and decide what are the most compelling pieces of software that solve various different problems and pull them into the distro, right? And the cost of doing this, because we allow the community to lead us and the
22:42
developers to show us what is most exciting, what works well, where is the mindshare going, right? Because we allow the community to sort of be that massive electoral body, the cost of developing an enterprise Linux distribution,
23:02
the cost of developing an enterprise Linux distribution that anybody can use drops very far, right? The price of failure is lower and because of that, the entire open source community, because let's not forget, there are derivative downstream distributions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as well,
23:22
the entire open source community gets access to enterprise quality software in theory at a price much lower than what it should cost for proprietary software companies to do the same thing, right? And that larger circle that isn't just Red Hat, but it's the entire
23:40
open source community working together because everything is GPL and everything goes back upstream, that gives us the energy that we need, right, to continue to threaten and push the proprietary companies out of business, hopefully. I could ramble on a little longer here, but instead I'm just going to name a couple of other projects, right,
24:03
upstreams that have been adopted across various Linux distributions that have been led by Fedora and Red Hat, to try to underline the point that, again, our ecosystem is trying to attract the developers who are interested in getting their hands dirty and doing all sorts of new things, right?
24:23
So you've got Pulse Audio, you've got Network Manager, you've got Package Kit, you've got D-Bus, you've got HAL, which is now being replaced by Device Kit. These are all things that are way over my head, right, but these are fundamental pieces of the Linux system where innovative work is being done within the Fedora community
24:42
and where we're looking for more and more developers to help us test things, to help add features, to help really be a part of it and cut their open source teeth in our ecosystem so that we can all then go forth into whatever companies we go to and be more equipped to spread the open source message.
25:07
Alright. Any questions? Any questions? Did I say anything wrong in the technical world? Did anyone want to correct me? Yeah, Joe.
25:24
Is it putting the companies out of business as a goal or just having the alternative? I was a little careless with my words, I suppose. I think the goal is to show that the open source model is clearly superior, right, and that you will see as new companies and new technical companies begin,
25:45
they're going to say, well, it's blindingly obvious that adopting an open source model and investing in and joining the community that already exists is going to make us so much more efficient that sooner or later the guys that are graduating from Harvard Business School are going to assume, yes,
26:04
I have to build my community an open source way if I want to be relevant. I think that's a better way to phrase it. Again, it's a good question. I don't want to drag myself too far off on a tangent, but a point
26:21
that I used to make in an older talk that I gave is that for a lot of us developers, open source participation is a very philosophical choice. We believe very deeply in free software and that is why we do it. But when we talk to the guys that wear the suits and ties, they understand that and they respect that and they appreciate that,
26:46
but we also need to be able to show them that it's a sound business investment, that they're going to make more money and their company is going to be more successful if they embrace open source. And that's part of what the Red Hat community team's job is. Within the fedora
27:03
space, we've got people who drink the Kool-Aid and who believe it very passionately, and they're going to participate because it's in their blood. And within the Red Hat space we've got a lot of that too, but we want to make sure that we are consistently reminding everybody within the company from the top all the way down to the bottom
27:24
that what makes us a special company and what makes any company that's an open source company special is because not only do you acknowledge what open source communities can do for you, but that you buy in completely and that you don't go half way. You don't just throw your code up on a website and say, well, I guess we're an open source company. If you're not going to
27:42
build community around it, if you're not going to actively manage those communities, and if you're not going to try to allow those communities to leverage the investments and resources that a company wants to make, then you might as well not do open source at all. It's an all in or all out proposition. Either you've got to be an open source company and go all the way,
28:04
or you should just not bother at all. If you go half way, I think you give up all the benefits that in theory having proprietary IP could give you, and you get none of the benefits that open source could give you.
28:22
So while I'm on this topic of community, I'll move to the third of the four foundations that represent Fedora. We talked about freedom and we talked about first. Now I want to talk about friends, because so many of my friends are here in the audience.
28:44
This is the less technical part of the talk. I already talked about the fact that about two thirds of the packages in Fedora are maintained by our community. I want to talk briefly about a couple of other pieces of the Fedora community that I think provide the ecosystem around the distro that folks might not know about.
29:07
Joe did a little bit of this in his talk as well, because the distro is great and it's critically important, but the Fedora project is so much greater than just the CD that you can go get at our booth. The Fedora infrastructure team I think is a shining star in our community, because it embraces perfectly the
29:28
community building tactics that we have tried to perfect and implement over the course of the last few years. It is almost entirely volunteer driven and it is also entirely open. Every piece of software,
29:42
every single piece of software that's used to keep the Fedora project running is completely open source. We won't use anything that's not open source. We completely eat our own dog food. We've got a system administration team that basically follows the sun. You've got volunteers all over the world who are part of the Fedora infrastructure team. If a server
30:04
goes down in the middle of the night in the United States, in theory there ought to be someone somewhere where it's daytime for them who's going to be able to respond to that message quickly. And in theory, no one should have to wake up in the middle of the night in America. In fact, our infrastructure itself is co-located around the world. We've recently, in the last year or so,
30:26
built up a pretty nice data center in Germany that helps us make us kind of fault tolerant, I suppose. And the Fedora infrastructure project, from the perspective of someone who wants to participate, I
30:43
think is an excellent place to get started because we've seen some of our recent success stories of really brilliant new contributors to the project come through the Fedora infrastructure team. There's a guy named Ricky Zhu who's now 18 years old who started contributing to Fedora when
31:03
he was 16. He came in through the Fedora websites and the Fedora infrastructure project. He just started his first year of university and he's one of the most important people in the Fedora infrastructure project. And I know there's stories like that all over the open source community, but I think it really
31:24
represents for any of the people in the audience who are still in school and looking to get their first job in open source or looking to make the first step of what's going to be a long career in open source software, I think it shows how these communities, if they're built right and if the leaders understand that they have to think about building community and not just doing things themselves,
31:46
it shows the incredible potential for someone at a young age who otherwise wouldn't be able to get an opportunity in some normal sort of corporate situation to build up such a huge amount of experience and authority that when they're ready
32:03
to get their first full-time job, they're going to be years ahead of most of the other people that they're competing for. And I think that doing that encourages such a positive feedback loop that it's important that all
32:20
communities work on that because it will continue to increase the size of the open source workforce. The last thing I want to mention on this sort of education or young contributor point of view is we have a project in Fedora called the Fedora Scholarship. And we give it out, this is the second year that we're giving it out, and the application deadline for it in fact is sometime next week.
32:46
I think it's the 15th of February, next Friday I think is what it is. If you are somebody or if you know somebody who is very active in open source, preferably very active in Fedora, but very active in open source, who is starting their first year of university later in 2009, so like the fall of 2009,
33:10
encourage them to go onto Google and type Fedora Scholarship and read about it because this is something that we're going to do every year, and we want to basically give an incentive for people who are right at that point
33:23
in time where they're going to start their university career, who have shown interest in open source, we want to help them pay for their university bills and encourage them to stay in the open source community as they go through university. So I wanted to kind of make that little sales pitch.
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The last thing I want to talk about in the friends section of my talk here is an area where I think Fedora needs to use community to improve over the course of the Fedora 11 and Fedora 12 release cycles. And it's one of the goals of Fedora all the way from our Fedora project
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leader Paul Freilds on down, and that is to improve the quality assurance portion of Fedora. One of the things that we have struggled with in Fedora over the last couple of years is this challenge of getting stuff done versus building capacity that allows more people to do stuff.
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Building the capacity is fundamental to community. You've got to build an infrastructure in which people can participate before the people can participate. If you just have one person trying to do the job all by themselves, they're quickly going to get overwhelmed, they're quickly going to burn out, and they might be the most brilliant person in the world, and our QA people are,
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but they're going to reach a limit very quickly where they simply cannot work 24-7 and get everything done that needs to be done. So, in recent history, I would argue to you that Fedora has fallen into this trap over here. Too much time needed to get the basic QA for the distro done, not enough time available to build a community around Fedora QA.
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It's improved over the last year or so. We've had some people that have stepped up and rebuilt Fedora's bug triage community. We've had a guy named James Laska lead a series of Fedora test days that have been very good. We've had basically an IRC channel and a specific topic for each of these days.
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We've tested things like PyKickstart, the ext4 file system. In Fedora 10, we tested all the full disk encryption and its integration into the Fedora installer. We've seen enough of the seed of the fact that with the right ideas and a little bit of time spent, you can build a community around QA.
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This past week was very wonderful for this project. A guy named Adam Williamson, who used to be with Mandriva, joined Red Hat. His job is going to be to build a community around QA, specifically in the Fedora space. That's another area, critically important, that there's a lot of opportunity for participation. I wanted to be sure to mention that.
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The last thing I want to talk about is the last of the four foundations is features. We've got freedom, we've got first, representing our innovation, we've got friends, representing our
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community, and we've got features, representing what on earth have we actually produced for you. Yesterday, I think it was yesterday, no, Thursday, two days ago, Fedora 11 Alpha was released. I want to quickly run down some of the cool things that are in it, and then encourage you to go and download it.
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I mentioned this earlier, the goal in Fedora 11 of getting startup time down to about 20 seconds. The first cut of that, that we started in Fedora 10, continues in Fedora 11. A lot of the way they're going about doing this is trying to identify the places where IO really tends to block during the boot process and eliminate that.
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If you want to know more, ask Spot. Again, the first passive device kit, which as I understand it is sort of a rewrite of how the hardware extraction layer is in Fedora 11. EXT4 is replacing EXT3 in Fedora 11, a little crufty, EXT4 has some better performance.
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There's also the first parts of Butter FS, I guess that's how I say it, I don't know how you people say it, but if you want to try that, that's starting to get ready in Fedora 11. The feature that I like the most is something that we call Presto.
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What it really means is delta RPMs. Let's say OpenOffice, for example, releases an update and you run yum update and you've got to download some 20 megabyte RPM. The amount of code that actually changed in that 20 megabyte RPM is only a few kilobytes because it was just one security update.
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The delta RPMs feature is going to make that possible so that you don't have to download the entire new update and have 90% of what you download be exactly the same bits that you already have.
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If your bandwidth isn't great, I think that's a really compelling feature. It just feels more efficient and I kind of like that. There's also a lot of you guys, I know I discovered this a few years ago from the Windows side, there's a project called MinGW, which allows you to do cross-compiling of applications.
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You can write your Linux application or you can write your application in C. You can use GCC to compile it for Linux and instead of having to rebuild it on a full Microsoft stack or something like that, you can use MinGW to build the Windows executable of a free software application that you've written completely in your Linux system.
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So if you're an engineer who has to build applications that run on multiple platforms, here's a way to do it without having to spin up an entire Microsoft stack.
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Python 2.6 is in Fedora 11 as well as GNOME 226, KDE 4.2 and XFCE 4.6. The KDE and XFCE are release candidate or betas right now, but we're also still a few months out from Fedora 11 finals. So all of those projects will continue to mature over time.
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In conclusion, well, before I conclude, are there any questions? I can't hear, that's why I'm walking toward you, not to throttle you.
40:08
Thanks. One of the questions I have is what you guys are doing specifically around KDE and the class, you know, KDE 3.5 and KDE 4 series. Because with OpenSUSE, we've had a large number of KDE users who want to stick with
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3, we've had a large number who want to be on the, you know, the cutting edge. So I'm curious what Fedora is doing to solve that or what you guys are doing for them. Spot, do you want that? Can you answer that? You probably can answer that better than me. We have no intentions to going backwards and providing the 3 environment from a compatibility perspective,
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because we feel strongly that at this point 4.2 is reasonably feature comparable with the 3.5 series, and where there are gaps, we'd much rather encourage contribution to fix those gaps than have people just stay stagnant on the old stuff.
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Right, right, right. Cool. Well, thank you. Michael Tieman, who basically created Cygnus, is here somewhere. Excuse me? So I'm going to wrap it up. Oh, yes, you go, then I'll wrap up.
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You talked about Xen and KVM earlier on. Some of us were dealing with virtualized environments, preferably would like to have a common environment. For instance, Sun in Solaris goes with Xen to a certain degree in parallel to Solaris containers.
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So the question is, is Red Hat and Fedora going to support Xen in the future, or are you going with KVM on? Right. Well, let's be very clear. Red Hat already supports Xen in Red Hat Enterprise Linux,
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and is therefore committed to supporting it until the end of life of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which is 7 years or whatever. Fedora never makes a commitment to support anything for longer than 13 months. This is part of Fedora's value proposition. We believe we can be innovative because
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we don't have a large legacy set of stuff that we have to support. So, Shadowman says, I would encourage you to give me as much money as you possibly can to support Xen, because I will do it for you. I will sell you all the Xen support you like. Fedora says, we're going to take advantage of the fact that we've got VertManager and libvert and APIs
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that allow us to switch out the virtualization from Xen to KVM or anything else that we want underneath, and the user never has to know about it, and Fedora is going to continue to do the best of what exists today. So, that's all I got for you. Alright, I am out of time now.
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So, let me quickly say a few words about our Fedora community in Europe, because it rocks. If Jono Bacon were here, he would say it's metal. We've got a great group of guys here, and girls, that keep Fedora running, that operate all of the major events, and the next big place that Fedora is going to be, is going to be at LinuxTOG in Berlin in June.
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We are going to hold our annual European floodcon there. It will be in conjunction with LinuxTOG. It's basically going to be the biggest Fedora event of the year in Europe, and I would encourage all of you to come to LinuxTOG.
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There you go. If you want to join our community, we would love to have you. Feel free to come by our booth. Feel free to, if you're ready to become a contributor, go to join.fidoraproject.org. It's a trivial process to get started, get your little wiki page up, and have at it.
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And I thank you very much for your time and attention. Thank you.