Back from ApacheCon!
I’ve got to say, I found it really useful this year. Last year, I
was pretty new to the ASF, and found that my expectations of
ApacheCon didn’t quite match reality; it wasn’t a rip-roaring success
exactly, for me, as a result.
However, many details of how the ASF works — and how the conference
itself works and is organised — are much clearer after you’ve spent
some time lurking and absorbing practices in the meantime. (The
visibility one gets into the process as a member of the ASF makes
this a lot easier.)
Result: it was much more of a success for me this time around.
Plenty of networking, putting faces to the names, hanging out, and
discussing many aspects of our work.
The hackathon really worked out, too; while we didn’t produce a hell
of a lot of code per se, it made for a good ‘developer summit’ and I
think we established solid agreement on SpamAssassin’s short-term
directions and goals. (summary: rules, and faster).
On top of that, I got to meet up with Colm
MacCarthaigh and Cory
Doctorow for discussion of Digital Rights
Ireland. Looks like I’ll be
spending a bit of time on that next year 
Finally: Solaris. On Monday night, I got to sit down with Daniel
Price, one of the kernel engineers behind
Solaris Zones, work
through a quick demo of a bug I was running into with chroot(2) and
zones on our rule-QA buildbot
server, and watch as he
visually traced it through the OpenSolaris kernel
source on
the web. From this — and from talking to Daniel — it’s pretty clear
that things have changed at Sun. Pretty much the entire Solaris
operating system is now a full-on open-source project; it’s not just
a marketing gimmick. The source is up there on the web, that’s the
source for the code they’re running now, and there’s no half-assed
‘freeze it, cut out the good bits, and throw it over the wall’
fake-open-source tricks.
The concept of getting this level of access to Solaris source code
and engineers, would have blown my mind when I was Iona’s sysadmin
back in the 1990s I’m very impressed.
apache apachecon apacheconus2005 asf conferences open source opensolaris solaris spamassassin sun virtualization zones
This post was written by Justin, source: My ApacheCon Roundup