Document Freedom Day (DFD) is a global grassroots effort  to promote and build awareness of the importance of free document formats in particular and open standards in general.  If you have ever received a document from a friend that your software could not open, then you know the frustration of proprietary formats.  Document Freedom Day promotes open formats so that users can freely exchange their data no matter what software program they choose to use. Complete interoperability is the ultimate goal of those who support open standards.

And it’s not just a matter of convenience. Public documents stored on closed, proprietary formats require citizens to pay twice to access information that already belongs to them, once for the document creation, and again to access them.  There is also the danger of losing the information stored in those formats should the vendors go out of business, or decide that they no longer want to maintain that technology. Proponents of open document formats believe all public information should be stored using open standards accessible to all.

Melanie Chernoff, Red Hat’s Public Policy Manager explains that “Red Hat is committed to open source, open standards and open content. Document Freedom Day is an opportunity to single out  one of these important areas, open standards. DFD promotes open standards in the document space, which is where the average user really feels the impact of proprietary formats.

“We view Document Freedom Day as a great vehicle for highlighting the importance of standards to interoperability and user choice, which reflect Red Hat’s core values. “

Document Freedom Day is supported by a large group of organizations and individuals, including, but not limited to ANSOL, Ars Aperta, BrOffice.org, COSS, Esoma, Estándares Abiertos, FFII, Free Knowledge Foundation, Free Software Foundation, Free Software Foundation Europe, Free Software Foundation Latin America, Funambol, Google, IBM, NLnet, ODF Alliance, Open Forum Europe, Open Source Initiative (OSI), Opentia, OSL, iMatix, Red Hat, Sun, The Open Learning Centre.

The list of DFD Teams is available at: http://documentfreedom.org/Category:Teams

Do you know what’s happening in middleware? Budget crunch keeping you from attending industry gatherings? Bring the conference to your desktop. Take a minute (or a few hours) and attend the JBoss Virtual Experience.

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 LIVE online
(on-demand February 16th – May 11th, 2009)

Find out more or register now.

Join our executives, key developers, and your business peers. Attend keynote sessions for executive insight into the future of open source and the middleware roadmap for 2009 and beyond. Visit the Exhibit Hall and chat live with booth representatives. Come to the Networking Cafe for in-depth technical and business discussions, birds-of-a-feather chats, and live Q&A with our speakers.

Whether you’re a developer, enterprise architect, or senior IT manager, this one-day event will show you how JBoss can help you build, integrate, deploy, and manage mission-critical applications and services while lowering your costs without sacrificing performance, security, or functionality.

For updates, follow us on Twitter.

Here’s a few more details:

Keynotes with live Q&A:

• Business keynote by Jim Whitehurst (live event only) and Craig Muzilla
• technical keynote by Rob Cardwell and Sacha Labourey

Sessions with live Q&A:

• business, technical and government
• 2 panel discussions: Customer viewpoint and Developer panel

Exhibit Hall:
Red Hat booths, including:

• JBoss Enterprise Middleware
• JBoss Operations Network
• JBoss.org
• Customer Reference
• MRG (Messaging, Realtime, and Grid)
• Cloud Computing

Partner booths include:

• Alfresco
• Carahsoft
• CityTech
• Consilium1
• DLT
• Dell
• EnterpriseDB
• Exadel
• Freedom OSS
• Ingres
• Jaspersoft
• USolutions
• Vizuri

Media sponsor:

• DZone

Networking cafe:

• Birds-of-a-Feather sessions with JBoss Rock Stars

Find out more or register now.

Next weekend, the Fedora community will be at the ninth Free and Open source Software Developers European Meeting (FOSDEM)–one of the best free and open source events in Europe.

And this year again, we expect an amazing attendance. More than 40 Fedora ambassadors are coming from different parts of Europe to represent Fedora and welcome visitors. Incredible, when three years ago, there were only two of us. Another reason to say Fedora is more powerful than 2³ and e³!

In addition, we are honored to have with us at the same time Max Spevack and Greg DeKoenigsberg, two of the three leaders of the Fedora community.

Finally, we’d like to invite you to visit us either at our booth or at our talk sessions. For more details, see the schedule below and visit the FOSDEM web site or the Fedora wiki.

Main Track room (Janson)
Saturday Feb 7

• 15:00 – The Fedora Project – Max Spevack (Fedora)

Fedora/CentOS development room (H.2214)
Saturday Feb 7

• 13:00 – RPM Packaging — Christoph Wickert (Fedora)
• 14:00 – Fedora Electronics Lab — Chitlesh Goorah (Fedora)
• 15:00 – Fedora-fr Next Challenges — Thomas Canniot (Fedora)
• 16:00 – Func & Symbolic — Luca Foppiano & Francesco Crippa (Fedora)
• 17:00 – Sugar and Fedora — Tomeu Vizoso & Greg DeKoenigsberg (Fedora)
• 18:00 – Augeas — Raphael Pinson & Jeroen van Meeuwen (Fedora)

Sunday Feb 8

• 10:00 – Introduction to CentOS — Fabian Arrotin (CentOS)
• 11:00 – Enterprise Linux Competitive Landscape — Dag Wieers (CentOS)
• 12:00 – CentOS on the desktop — Toshaan Bharvani (CentOS)
• 12:30 – Poor Man’s SAN w/ CentOS and gPXE — Andreas Rogge (CentOS)
• 13:00 – Securing CentOS with SELinux — Ralph Angenendt (CentOS)
• 14:00 – Large CentOS LDAP Deployments — Geerd Dietger Hoffmann (CentOS)
• 15:00 – Cobbler & Koan — Robert Lazzurs & Jasper Capel (Fedora)
• 16:00 – Free IPA — Simo Sorce (Fedora)

The Fedora Project holds a “Fedora Users and Developers Conference” (FUDCon) several times each year, in various locations around the world. The latest installment was September 5-7, in Brno, Czech Republic.

Max Spevack, Red Hat’s manager of Community Architecture, shared his trip report with us.

Thursday, Sept. 4

Greg and I traveled from Amsterdam to Brno on Thursday, flying to Prague and then taking the bus down to Brno. The trip was uneventful, though we got ourselves a bit mixed up with the bus schedule. We purchased tickets leaving from Prague’s central bus station at noon, but we thought that the tickets’ origin was the bus station at Prague’s airport. As such, by the time we got to the central bus station, we had long-missed our bus and had to purchase new tickets for a bus leaving at 2:30. No big deal.

We bumped into Cliff Perry, one of our old Red Hat Network compatriots, in the Prague airport. He’s spending the week in Brno for other Red Hat business, but he’ll be hanging around at FUDCon a bit as well. Also at the Prague airport, we bumped into a flight attendant who works for Delta. She struck up a conversation with Greg when she saw his Carolina Hurricanes t-shirt, since she lives in Chapel Hill. We mentioned that Jim Whitehurst (formerly Delta’s COO) is now Red Hat’s CEO, and she spoke in glowing terms of him and his tenure at Delta.

Prague seemed like an awesome city–the next time I travel to Brno, I must spend an extra few days in Prague and re-enact my favorite scenes from Mission: Impossible.

The bus ride from Brno to Prague was pretty long, but the laptop battery made it most of the way, and I had a bunch of emails queued up to send upon arrival. Radek Vokal met us at the train station, brought us to the hotel, and then dropped us off at the Red Hat office, where we found a room of FUDConners (Dimitris Glezos, Diego Burigo Zacarao, David Cantrell, and Hans de Goede) already hacking.

We split up into a few groups for dinner on Thursday night, and I briefly want to add my remarks about the meal. Dimitris, our Fedora Localization Leader, tried valiently to communicate with the waitress to translate the menu from Czech into English. Eventually, a customer from another table was brought over to assist in the translation. We managed to figure out that an entire page of the menu was “meat, cooked in various ways, with nothing particularly odd in any of the recipes.”Therefore, we ordered a lot of that along with beer and left a large tip.

The food was great, as was the dinner entertainment: Jeroen (Dutch) trying to tell Dimitris (Greek) that he (Dimitris) is incorrect about Greek history, and Thomas (German) telling us about how he messed up his Porsche by running over a lorry wheel at some insanely high speed that I won’t reprint.

Upon returning from dinner, I met Jonathan Roberts, who had successfully made the trip from the UK. After working so much with JonRob in Fedora Marketing and Fedora Websites, it was great to meet him in person.

Friday, Sept. 5

Still sleepy, I wandered down to the lobby where I had the chance to meet Nicu Buculei in person for the first time. This was a great joy for me, since I’m a huge fan of all his artwork and contributions to Fedora, and I was very pleased that he was able to make the trip from Romania.

As always, the Fedora crew was nothing if not predictable. Eight a.m., and everyone was down in the lobby (since that’s the only place where we had wireless) tapping away on their laptops. I love it. Folks ended up waiting for me to leave, since I couldn’t walk out of the lobby before my fetchmail process finished running.

We had to take the tram from the hotel to the university, and the more scrupulous of our contributors insisted on purchasing tram tickets. One unlucky lady in a little newsstand near the tram station was selling the tickets, and for a moment, it appeared that 40 non-Czech speakers were all going to try to purchase a ticket costing about 1 Euro individually. Greg couldn’t deal with the chaos and wandered off to figure out where exactly the university was while I and several others suggested that one person purchase all of the tram tickets. We could sort it out later. We made it to the university–some of us legally, and others freeloading on the tram.

Everything was fantastic at FUDCon. Radek and the crew from Brno went above and beyond the call of duty, taking care of every detail. Food, signs, wireless, rooms all set up, microphones–nothing was lacking.

Friday’s hackfest leaders and subjects were:

• Hans de Goede–Becoming a Fedora Packager
• Miroslav Suchy–Spacewalk
• Marek Mahut–Fedora Astronomy
• Tomeu Vizoso–Sugar performance and integration on rawhide
• Dimitris Glezos–Transifex: Packaging, statistics support
• Harald Hoyer, Thomas Woerner, Nils Philippsen–DBus/PolicyKit privilege separation (config tools)

We had a Flickr group set up with photos, and somewhere around 80 folks at our first hackfest day, with a nice mixture of Red Hat employees, Fedora contributors, Brno locals, and folks from all over Europe. David Cantrell won this FUDCon’s prize for longest trip to the event. He came from Honolulu, Hawaii–a whopping 7,561 miles (12,167 kilometers).

We were gathered online in #fudcon on freenode, where we were able to keep people all over the world informed about what was happening at the event, so that they could join in using various internet collaboration tools, like gobby.

I sat in briefly on Hans de Goede’s talk about how to become a Fedora packager. Hans put his years as a professor to good work, giving a clear lecture on how someone can join our packaging group. There were about 20 guys in the audience, and after the talk was finished, it turned into a workshop with Hans patiently answering questions.

A few other highlights from the day:

• I helped one potential contributor get his Fedora Account out of a limbo status, and tomorrow he is hopefully going to find me again and we will finish getting him set up and introduced to the Fedora Infrastructure team as a potential new contributor.

• I passed out the t-shirts, which allows me to shake hands with every single FUDCon attendee.

• Nils and Harald gave a talk about DBus and PolicyKit in Fedora, with a very attentive audience of about 10 or 15. This sort of thing is great–I love seeing the Red Hat engineers and the Fedora contributors working together on highly technical work items.

For dinner, I joined up with the Italian delegation. We walked to one restaurant with outside tables that seemed very nice, but it was full. We didn’t want to wait, so we continued walking. Everyone was hungry, so I brought the folks back to the same restaurant from the previous night, where we had another excellent dinner.

Then I returned to the hotel, where I spent some time writing down a few thoughts for a mini-keynote on Saturday morning.

Saturday, Sept. 6

The main session and presentation day of FUDCon was very successful. Approximately 110 people attended, which is about the same level of attendance that FUDCon Boston 2008 and 2007 saw. FUDCon Raleigh 2008 remains the attendance record, at 175. However, leading up to FUDCon Brno, in the back of my mind I was hoping for about 60 people at the hackfest days and 100 at the session day. We beat those estimates, so I was very pleased.

The day began at 10 a.m. (I am not as early a riser in the mornings as Mr. Frields, so my FUDCons start later), and I gave a short speech, thanking the organizers, pointing out the importance of global FUDCons, and highlighting some of the contributions that various audience members have made to Fedora. Greg (as always) led the session-pitching portion of the day. It went very well–most of the audience had never done a BarCamp before, but we filled up the grid with talks, and FUDCon was fully underway.

The first talk that I attended was Jeroen van Meeuwen’s session on custom spins. It was a workshop-style session, in which people who were trying different customization projects talked about the problems that they were running into. About 20 people attended the session. I took a few notes, and the primary takeaway is that there is still a huge amount of confusion about the Spins Bureaucracy in general–technical approval, trademark approval, what is needed when, etc. I think the work that Paul Frields is currently doing on revamping our trademark guidelines will help to clarify these questions, but the sooner that is rolled out, the better.

There were also a few questions about how to get spins hosted, mirrored, etc. We discussed the purpose and use of the generic-logos package, which several people were curious about.

Following this session, I wandered back to the main room and listened in on the Sugar/OLPC presentation, which had about 50 people in the audience. The session focused on the vision of OLPC and how Fedora community members can contribute to Sugar. One of the easiest ways is by becoming a packager for various Sugar activities, which (I am told) ought to be one of the easiest sorts of packages to maintain, as it is all pretty much just Python.

After lunch, I kept a slightly lower profile in the afternoon, trying to get a handle on some of the email that I’d missed over the past few days, some blogging, and some budget calculations for FUDCon. However, I did sit on the Spacewalk talk. As someone who spent 18 months in the Red Hat Network group, it was great to listen to the discussion about the open source Satellite. I learned that Spacewalk consists of about 185 packages, which are getting into Fedora at the rate of about 1-2 per week, and an implementation using PostgreSQL is on the way, which will finally rid the codebase of its dependencies on Oracle.

I attended Francesco Ugolini’s talk on Fedora Ambassadors, and I was very impressed with the passionate, thoughtful speech that he gave. I led a brief session about FUDCon Europe 2009 planning, but it didn’t draw as much conversation as I had hoped it would. I guess people just don’t care that much about an event that is a year in the making!

The final session of the day was a hilarious “learn enough Czech to survive the evening” session, in which David Cantrell stated various phrases in English (“I would like another beer please”), and we learned how to repeat them in Czech. Once the audience questions transitioned from useful to bawdy, we put an end to the session and closed down FUDCon.

FUDPub was a great success. Radek Vokal rented out an entire restaurant for us, and we had 96 people there. Everyone got an excellent dinner (pork or chicken, salad, and french fries) and a free beverage of choice. After that, they were on their own for anything else that they wanted. I had a nice chat with David Cantrell, and another with Radek Vokal.

Sunday, Sept. 7

Sunday was the final hackfest day of FUDCon, and we had about 60 people turn up for it. Some folks were traveling on Sunday, so attendance was slightly lower than Friday and Saturday. I spent a large chunk of time at the Red Hat office with Radek, going through receipts and filing expense reports, and just winding FUDCon down from an organizational and logistical perspective. But people were still getting work done, with func and Sugar hackfests in full swing. Jeroen was maintaining a list of packages needing review on the chalkboard in the front of one room. People were making good use of the resources available to them and the fact that large numbers of contributors were face to face in the same room. I was told that this FUDCon was the first time in two years that a number of the Red Hat engineers in Brno and Stuttgart were in the same physical location, so that provided a lot of value back to Red Hat itself, both from the RHEL and the “Fedora as an upstream for all of Red Hat’s Linux products” points of view.

On Sunday night, we again took over a restaurant in downtown Brno, though this time it was every-contributor-for-himself in terms of dinner and drink. Greg and I walked around the city a bit and saw some cool sights. I forgot my camera, of course, but Greg has pictures.

Conclusion

This was the best-organized FUDCon we have ever had, and the credit for that goes to Radek Vokal and his team of volunteers in Red Hat’s Brno office, who handled all of the details locally.

It also helped that our budget went a long way in the Czech Republic. Consider the following:

Hotel rooms were fully paid for out-of-town attendees. We had several mini-suites, in which four people shared two double rooms with a small common room and bathroom. Greg and I roomed with Jonathan Roberts and Fabian Affolter.

Free wireless in the hotel’s lobby, which had more than enough room for everyone to spread out. Free breakfast included with the rooms.

Tram from the hotel to the university, making transportation very simple. Space at the university was free, due to Red Hat’s pre-existing relationship with the school in Brno, which was incredibly helpful. The number one factor in determining a FUDCon’s location is the ability to get space for free. The university’s facilities were very nice, though I’m pretty sure that we pressed the limit of its wireless network. New motto: Fedora, crashing wireless networks worldwide since 2003.

Coffee, tea, juice, water, and soda all day, every day, in the lobby area of FUDCon. Furthermore, we had plates of deli meat, cheeses, fruits, veggies, and bread each day that served pretty much everyone in attendance.

About 100 people at FUDPub, with a dinner and drink paid for by the Fedora Project.

A free t-shirt for everyone in attendance.

All of this, plus a few travel sponsorships for community members, and it looks like we are going to come in comfortably under our budget for the event.

All in all, a fantastic three days and four nights in Brno. My thanks again to everyone who attended, and everyone who helped to organize.

I had the privilege of giving not one but two talks at the Red Hat Summit–both about open source systems management topics. A good deal of this content was also shared with a different audience at FudCON–the Fedora Users and Developers Conference. This was a great trip to Boston, and a fantastic chance to talk with users, administrators, and developers of all types.

The first talk I had a part in was Func, which I co-presented with Adrian Likins. Func, as mentioned before in Red Hat Magazine, is an API for controlling lots of nodes for arbitrary systems management tasks. It is ideally suited for replacing legacy SSH infrastructure as well as building new network applications that require secure network communications infrastructure.

We gave an overview for folks that hadn’t heard of Func before, and showed off several examples of things you can do with the Python API. Interest in Func is growing, and lots of folks are using it in ways we hadn’t originally intended (which is, of course, the idea).

One such application that surprised us was Open Symbolic, which aims to be a user-friendly systems management application written on Func. Additionally, some of our own IT folks have written a very lightweight “cloud” type management application using Func, which you should hear more about shortly. At the conclusion of that talk there were some very good questions about how things work, and also some interest in future expansions (with hopefully some patches coming down the pipe).

My second talk was about Cobbler, our next-generation installation server. I was very pleased to see Cobbler’s talk was standing-room only, showing that there is a lot of need for good tools to help streamline Linux installations and low-level datacenter setup tasks. Again, there were a tremendously good set of questions asked, and the community is already getting a lot larger with people trying out Cobbler after hearing about it at Summit. I’m happy to see that.

The current idea behind Cobbler is to build a common installation service that various applications can use to deploy Linux (more on this below)rather than having to keep creating these components. I’ll also be extending it to deal with image-based deployments in addition to traditional kickstart deployments.

As always, we’ll continue to gather a large community of sysadmins to work together and build common tooling we can all share. The basic premise is that by working together, we can build tools that are more powerful than the tools we could build alone. By following an open development model with shared tools, the need to reinvent the same wheels to do the same tasks goes away.

We’re also building a large set of community documentation based on deployment best practices and tricks, and I hope to roll this into a nice openly licensed manual and deployment guide later this year. Open community, open code, open docs — neat!

And while all of this is nice, the most exciting part of Summit was the announcement about Spacewalk. Spacewalk is the project name for the open-sourcing of Red Hat Satellite Server. This is not a “community edition”, it’s everything. The upstream for all code in the project is going to the website, and we’re already seeing a lot of interest from existing Satellite customers and prospective users. We had a lot of great discussion at FudCON about places the project might go, and there have already been several non-Red Hat patches made against the codebase.

We also announced that Satellite will be using Cobbler to provide advanced deployment support next year, so we can already see the advantages of getting these tools to work together. Planned work includes adding open source database alternatives and improving our support for Fedora and derivative distributions.

In the future, Func may have a place in Spacewalk as well. We can also look at incorporating other proven open source management applications, tools, and libraries. Everyone is encouraged to join the Spacewalk mailing lists or IRC channels (#spacewalk on irc.freenode.net) if they are interested in learning more or have ideas/questions.

These three applications, in general, constitute a new way of thinking. Namely, how can we apply the Fedora Development model towards enterprise management applications and sysadmin-level tools and processes?

Rather than buy tooling from a vendor or inventing internal frameworks that disappear when one changes jobs or departments, what can we share and openly build together and re-use? While we use the Fedora model to produce a community-driven distribution, we’re now also using it to produce better ways to manage Enterprise Linux. This development model applies just as equally to Enterprise Linux as it does Fedora. It just works.

As Paul Frields (the Fedora Project Leader) indicated at FudCON, the future of Fedora (and in turn, Fedora Hosted Projects and Extras Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL)) is about lowering barriers to entry and encouraging collaboration–we are already doing well on technical grounds. How do we encourage more collaboration around management software? For starters, we work at making it easier to install. And we must make sure the communities remain active and integral, and continue to grow.

A lot of management software is hard to find and install because it’s not yet part of the distribution. I would encourage all ISVs out there that write open source software to look at getting their content into EPEL, where it can be easily found via search and is yum-installable. I’d also like them to take a look at how we are building strong communities around our projects using Fedora Hosted Infrastructure–and to take those examples to their own projects and communities.

Regardless of who we work for, open communication and collaboration are how we get ahead–and Fedora (and EPEL) are providing an outstanding breeding ground for open source software now–even in what was previously thought of as an “Enterprise” type cathedral environment. I should also mention that the Fedora community is full of packaging experts and smart folks who can help you. Join #fedora-devel on irc.freenode.net and say hi.

If you’re not interested in development, but adminster systems and want to know how you can help out, take a look at Mike McGrath’s new CSI venture.

Good ideas come from where we least expect them. The Fedora development model and infrastructure are really powerful ways to create software, documentation, and tools that solve problems for people who need to manage their Linux infrastructure. Whether you are interested in Cobbler, Func, or Spacewalk–or even if you’re interested in Linux systems management in general–let’s get together, find better ways to collaborate, and invest in the operating systems that we all love.

So, that’s my summary of the Red Hat Summit and FUDCon. Boston’s a beautiful city and I will give it a pass for not having sweet tea at all available restaurants. I look forward to Summit and FUDCon next year–we’re growing fast in Fedora and Red Hat Enterprise Linux land, and there’s still many more places to go.

Hot off the presses, Summit slide decks:

Red Hat Enterprise Linux Kernel Performance Optimization [PDF] – John Shakshober and Larry Woodman

Why Computers Are Getting Slower (And What We Can Do About It) [PDF] – Rik Van Riel

The Virtualization Toolbox. Open Source Solutions for Managing Virtual Environments [PDF 1] [PDF 2] – Dan Berrange and Richard Jones

Func – the Fedora Universal Network Connector [PDF] – Michael DeHann and Adrian Likins

Dynamic Grid Computing with Red Hat Enterprise MRG & Amazon EC2 [PDF] – Bryan Che

Missed the show? Catch up with our videos or check out the full list of available slide decks. We’ll be adding more of our (and your) favorites as they come in.

Other voices:

• Barton George (from Sun): Sun and Red Hat talk
• Halamka becomes an open source believer (from Dana Blankenhorn for ZDNet Healthcare)

As promised, we have the first of the slide decks from the Summit sessions:

Cobbler: Provisioning for Bare Metal and Virtualization
[ODP] slides by Michael DeHaan from his talk given Thursday June 19, 10:15 a.m.

And we still have a few more news items and blog entries about the Summit:

• Barton George (from Sun): Podcast interview with Jim Whitehurst
• Xen proponents question merits of Red Hat KVM hypervisor (Bridget Botelho for SearchServerVirtualization.com)
• IT leaders urged to contribute code to open-source projects (from Esther Schindler at Computerworld)

We’re still collecting all the news, updates, and postings from the Red Hat Summit. Now that our teams are back in the office, the real work of compiling all the video, audio, and materials we gathered has begun.

We know you’re all clamoring for more than links–the most popular question has been about the session and keynote videos and slide decks. The first few keynote videos are up at the Summit web site. We’ll be adding more as soon as some legal and liscensing issues are dealt with.

The slide decks are also on their way. The first few should be available this week, with more to follow.

And it won’t all be recap–also coming up are several articles that follow up on Summit and FUDCon topics, from the same folks that presented them in Boston.

In the news:

• Red Hat goes for virtualization (from Paul Mah at TechRepublic)
• Red Hat Launches oVirt Embedded KVM Hypervisor Project (from Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Linux Beacon)
• Red Hat opens Network…now how about a community? (from Matt Asay for CNet
• Red Hat expands open source virtualization applications (from Datamonitor via COMTEX at TradingMarkets.com)
• Red Hat beefs up identity and security management (from Bridget Botelho at SearchEnterpriseLinux.com)
• Red Hat to embrace virtualisation (from Egan Orion for CRN Australia)

Other voices:

• Jon ‘maddog’ Hall: Red Hat Summit Summary
• Mike McGrath (Fedora): Announcements from FUDCon
• Barton George (Sun): Back From Boston and the Red Hat Summit and FUDCON and Red Hat Summit/FUDcon: Pics and Podcasts

FUDCon comes on the heels of the Red Hat Summit, with many of the speakers and developers doing double-duty. Even Red Hat’s CEO showed up for both events. Did you miss out? Never fear, there’s always another FUDCon coming up, and the Fedora Project Leader is happy to give you the report from this one.

From FUDCon Boston, June 20, 2008:

The Fedora Users and Developers Conference (FUDCon) is in full swing on its second day. We have another full day of exceptional hacking taking place on the third floor of the Hynes Convention Center in Boston. Just as the Red Hat Summit is drawing to a close downstairs–winding up with a half-day of sessions and panels–we’re just now kicking into high gear. This has been an exceptional way to introduce open source customers to the larger ecosystem behind the products they love, and the community that powers Fedora, the upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Last night at the close of FUDCon Day 1, we had two huge events–the first came courtesy of Fedora’s Infrastructure team. Over the last couple of years, the team has built a world-class infrastructure for hosting and communication throughout the entire Fedora community. Last night, Infrastructure team leader Mike McGrath announced a one-two punch of free software goodness for Fedora. First, our Fedora Account System is now an OpenID provider. This means that the identity you create in the Fedora Project can be used across thousands of web sites. The other big announcement was the new Fedora telephony system, “Fedora Talk,” based on the juggernaut free software VoIP project Asterisk.

That’s right, Fedora contributors will be able to use VoIP to set up voice meetings that facilitate better and more efficient collaboration. There will also be features to ensure that those conversations don’t damage the openness and transparency on which Fedora thrives. As Mike announced in this recent blog post, the hardware and bandwidth have been provided courtesy of our friends at ServerBeach, and the dial-in numbers by Arrival Telecom and DiDDiscount.

Red Hat CEO Jim Whitehurst arrived in the FUDCon space just in time for Mike’s big announcement. I saw a smile spread across his face as he saw the incredible work done by our Infrastructure team–just a recent example of the constant, continuous improvements in Fedora. If you’re interested in what Jim had to say, Fedora engineer Jeremy Katz posted an excellent summary of the speech and subsequent Q&A.

This morning things kicked into high gear again. Some of today’s highlights:

• Our QA and Triage teams continued some very intense work on Fedora’s testing processes, and discussing the current and future use of Rawhide and how it can be used most effectively to improve the distribution.
• A brainstorming session was held by Max Spevack and Mairin Duffy on the future of the Spins website, and how to generate a user-friendly experience for people who want to create and consume customized versions of Fedora (“spins”). Max and Mairin make a great team for keeping the talk on-track and focused on the user experience (or “story”) before lunch, and afterward narrowing in on guidelines and goals for the spin process itself.
• The Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux (EPEL) group members here at FUDCon also formed a hackfest session. The EPEL special interest group is all about helping enterprise Linux users use more of the thousands of software packages available in Fedora.
• The Community Architecture group had a long strategy meeting to talk about its funding for the rest of 2008–making sure it’s spent in a way that maximizes the benefits to Fedora and our community building goals. One of the most interesting things about our CA team–and frankly, one of the reasons many others want to emulate the way they build Fedora’s community–is that they conduct all this work openly and transparently. Anyone is free to see how we allocate our funds, set our priorities, and produce results from our community work.
• Thanks to our friends at Digium, the company behind Asterisk, many of our Infrastructure team, some folks who operate in remote areas of the globe, and a handful of other Fedora team leaders and engineers were able to receive SIP handsets. We’ll use those with the new Fedora Talk to test and implement new communications solutions for all our contributors.
• Around all this activity, there were a constant stream of visitors from the Red Hat Summit–people interested in the ways in which our community brings innovative new ideas and software to the world of free and open source software. Educators, engineers, system administrators, editors, students, journalists, C-level executives, and enthusiasts all were well represented.

It’s been an exhausting but incredibly fulfilling couple of days thus far–and the BarCamp day on Saturday is sure to be just as solid. Just another few days in the whirlwind of community-powered goodness that we call the Fedora Project.

In the news:

• Red Hat in Boston, Part 2.1: Fixing Patent Failure Without A Bulldozer (Serdar Yegulalp for Information Week)
• Red Hat, Amazon Team Up in the Cloud (Dan Berthiaume for eWeek)
• A new virtualizer for Red Hat (Gordon Haff for CNet News.com)
• Red Hat debuts new hypervisor, open-sources Linux management platform (Jon Brodkin for Network World)
• Red Hat chief: We are hard to do business with (Andrew Donoghue for ZDNet.co.uk
• Red Hat to embrace virtualisation (Egan Orion for The Inquirer)
• Red Hat Summit: Single sign-on via IPA server (from heise online)

Other voices:

• Paul Frields (Fedora Project Leader): Saturday Morning Fever (FUDCon info)
• Jeremy Katz (Red Hat engineer): Jim Whitehurst at FUDcon (including a summary of his Q&A)
• Jesse Keating (Red Hat): FUDcon