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Spacewalk, and what we can learn about naming
Red Hat releases Spacewalk. It is described as: “the upstream community project from which the Red Hat Network Satellite product is derived“. Congratulations to all whom have worked on it, especially my friends who tired endlessly over it in the past.
Red Hat, is sticking true to its promise, of open sourcing everything they make. Best of all, they recognise Fedora (they always did, since say, Fedora Core 2 or 3), CentOS (a direct “competitor”/rebuild of RHEL), and Scientific Linux (I know of a certain university’s sysadmin who will be blessing Spacewalk, as her life will now be a lot easier).
There have been a few blogs about it… Matt Asay asks about a community (Red Hat traditionally wasn’t good at this, but with Fedora, I believe they’ve learned, and I’m happy to say I think, I helped in the education process). No one however, focused on the technical aspects around Spacewalk/RHN.
Case in point: Oracle is at the heart of it. RHN was designed almost seven years ago, and I’ve heard amazing stories from Gafton, Greg, and Peter. How Gafton found hidden “secrets” inside Oracle to boost performance, and a whole bunch of interesting things, best to talk about over a beer (the irony? When I first met these folk, I couldn’t even legally drink a beer in the US…)
Read the Developer Documentation, note that they use Perl, Python and Java in the current code base (but only Perl and Java is the way forward). There’s a DB Schema available… and I wonder when someone will port this to MySQL?
The Spacewalk FAQ mentions the lack of resources in the past to add an open source database, but would want to do so soon. There’s even help on getting Oracle XE running. The glimmer that there is to be an open source database behind Spacewalk, is what tells me that the MySQL community, that benefit from such a tool (so you’re a DBA and a sysadmin at a fairly largeish installation), should port this to run on MySQL.
What else can we take away from Spacewalk? The excellent positioning. A community project from which the RHN product is derived. This is similar to what Fedora is positioned as: Another striking difference of Fedora is our goal to empower others to pursue their vision of what a free operating system should be like. Fedora now forms the basis for derivative distributions such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux , the One Laptop Per Child XO and Creative Commons’ Live Content DVDs.
Distinctive naming. Helps create a lack of confusion (at the price of an ubiquitous name? Sure, you just have two ubiquitous names now). MySQL Enterprise vs. MySQL Community. They’re both MySQL (don’t even get started on the odd/even numbering scheme…). I dream the day, when we have MySQL Enterprise and Sakila (formerly known as MySQL Community).
Back From Boston and the Red Hat Summit and FUDCON
The second half of last week I attended the Red Hat Summit and FUDCon which Sun and MySQL were silver sponsors of. The events were co-located at the Hynes convention center in Boston.
Although both events featured an impressive list of topics and tracks, other than the keynotes I spent the majority of my time meeting and talking to people. One of my goals was to figure out how Sun can better work with Fedora to get more of our software into their distro.
A few key Fedorans: Max Spevak, Dennis Gilmore, Tom "Spot" Callaway, Jeremy Katz, Paul Frields, Jesse Keating.
President and CEO Jim Whitehurst chats with Fedora board member, Karsten Wade, while Spot keeps a watchful eye out for ninjas.
Notes from Jim Whitehurst's two talks
I saw Red Hat's CEO speak both at the opening keynote as well as to the assembled Fedorans at FUDCon. Here are the high-level notes I took:
The Keynote
Jim has only been CEO since the beginning of this year and his speech was short on vision and long on reassuring the assembled customers, partners and developers that he was true to the company's open source vision.
- Red Hat is the leader in Open Source "period, full stop."
- One of the greatest features of Open Source is that the best ideas win.
- Jim discussed the recent patent settlement that Red Hat made talking about how it was the first time a patent settlement was made that was consistent with the GPL.
- Red Hat will remain 100% Open Source and has no intention of becoming proprietary.
- Job #1 is execute, execute, execute.
- RH will be delivering more products this year than any other year in the past.
- Service and Support are not career backwaters, the are key career paths.
- Red Hat's weakness is they are not always the easiest company to work with.
- The company's goal is to make community innovation accessible to their customers.
- Jim talked about unlocking the closed software that is hidden away inside of corporations and gave the examples of JPMorgan and a Canadian Insurance company that turned projects of theirs over to the community
At FUDcon
Jim only spoke for about 20 minutes and then turned it over to questions from the audience. I was impressed at how open he seemed and genuinely interested he was in the ideas and suggestions that came from the audience. He was quite relaxed and let the session run over the allotted hour.
One area that he cleared up was Red Hat's desktop strategy which he said was to be a player in the enterprise desktop but not the consumer market. Also when asked about the "Spaceman" he commented that he had never met Mark Shuttleworth but had some issues with the way Canonical did some things pointing out that while they may comply with the letter of the GPL, Ubuntu didn't necessarily comply with its spirit.
Stay Tuned
Right after the FUDcon talk I was able to grab Jim for a few minutes for a podcast. I hope to have that up in a few days for all to hear.
Sunset across the Charles taken at the Thursday night party at the Prudential Tower's Skywalk Observatory
Pau for now...
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Pics from CommunityOne & JavaOne
Here are a few pictures from earlier this week taken at CommunityOne and day one of JavaOne.
Podcasts a comin'
In the next few days I will also be posting a bunch of podcasts I did while in San Francisco including a bunch from key OpenSolaris folks, a post-Distro-smackdown recording, an interview with the Fedora IcedTea guys and a chat with the JRuby dudes.
Mr. Finch exits -- Before either event even began, the city was crawling with Java topped cabs.
CommunityOne and the Launch of OpenSolaris (this time for real)
Marten Mickos, Neelan Choksi and Ian Murdock hold forth on FOSS business models at RedMonkTwo.
C1 Speakers: Jono Bacon (Ubuntu), Zonker Brockmeier (OpenSUSE), Mako Hill (FSF), Karsten Wade (Fedora)
Sun Software EVP Rich Green and RedMonk pundit Steveo Grady talk seriously under the disco ball at the OpenSolaris launch party.
JavaOne - DayOne
The MySQL Community Crew attend their first JavaOne as Sun employees (and find that that means they don't get the free backpack). L-R: Jay Pipes, Giuseppe Maxia, Lenz Grimmer and Colin Charles.
The post-keynote deluge.
If you attend JavaOne you've gotta get your picture taken with Duke (there was a huge line).
Pau for now...