Tag Archives: apachecon

Need longer days

At a time when scientists warn that autumn will kill us all, I’m starting to feel that I need the days to get longer, not shorter.

In addition to a huge deadline at work, I have three writing deadlines the first week of October, and two conferences coming up (Ohio LinuxFest and ApacheCon) in the next few weeks too. And two books that I’ve promised to do reviews for, including one preface.

Somehow I need to figure out how to sleep less and still be productive.

As DNA observed, “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”

Unpatriotic?

While I was at ApacheCon, I had an interesting conversation with a newspaper reporter. Presumably, he was interviewing me. He had been assigned this Free Open Source Software thing, and was very new to the concept, and trying to understand what it was about.

We were talking about the fact that FOSS allows countries like Sri Lanka to build software businesses, with very little startup cost, that could legitimately compete with Microsoft, at least for business outside of the USA. It also allows these non-USA countries to be, as much as possible, independent from the USA for their information/computer/software industry.

I talked about how, in particular, I’m very interested in African nations being able to stop sending millions of dollars a year to Redmond, Washington, but be able to keep those dollars in their own country, paying local programmers, investing in local businesses.

It was at this point that the reporter observed that I was being very unpatriotic in promoting FOSS to developing nations.

This was a very interesting notion to me. I wonder if it’s accurate. However, I don’t think so. I think that being monopolistic, as a nation, is unpatriotic. Allowing the rest of the world to suffer, economically, in order to promote our own economy, is unpatriotic. Sure, it may seem patriotic, but that’s a grossly short-term vision. Because at some point, we kill our markets by forcing them into poverty. And, too, pushing other nations into poverty has unintended side effects. Like, for example, we end up exporting all of our jobs, rather than all of our products, because labor is so much cheaper elsewhere.

It turns out that if we make everyone wealthier, we make everyone wealthier. But if we make everyone poorer, we make everyone poorer. The spiral goes both ways, and our foreign policy had more influence on the direction than we like to think about. If we continue to force the spiral to go down, rather than up, at some point, some other nation (like, say, China) is going to decide that enough is enough, and that we’re far too irresponsible to be allowed to have that kind of power anymore.

So, no, I don’t think I’m being unpatriotic. I think I’m thinking globally, and long term, and that folks who try to frame FOSS as being communist and unpatriotic are being myopic.

More than once in the last two weeks, I have heard someone quip as follows:

When we were kids, our mothers said “eat your vegetables, some kid in China would love to have them.” Now we say to our kids “do your homework, some kid in India wants your job.”

I find this us-vs-them mentality to be grossly short-sighted. Until we can learn to cooperate on a global scale, we’re dooming our kids to a future of economic downturns and wars.

Pinawalla

On the Monday after the GeekOut, I took a hotel car to Pinawalla, to see the Elephant Orphanage. It was about a two hour drive, and we made a few stops along the way.
poc
I got the distinct impression that the driver had a deal with some of the folks such that he got a cut of their overcharging me for stuff. I suppose everyone has to make a living. We stopped to see some porcupines, and that cost me a couple dollars. I got some cool pictures, which at the moment I can’t find.

Anyways, eventually we got to Pinawalla, and to the Elephant Bath place, where I got to ride an elephant!!

We then went to the Elephant Orphanage, where there was a herd of 40 or so elephants. After looking at them for a while, we went down to the river, and shortly afterwards, the entire herd came down to the river for their bath. Some of them went across to the other side of the river, where they threw the red dirt on their backs.

On the way back to Colombo, we stopped at a number of other places, including a spice store, and a batik store, both of which were very interesting, but where I felt rather obliged to buy something. (I got some spices, but didn’t get any batiks, earning me a dirty look or two. I hate that sort of thing.)

However, in all, it was a very cool day, and it was very very cool to get to ride an elephant.

10G of audio

By the end of last week, I had more than 10G of audio on my desktop, from various interviews that I had done and not yet edited. This weekend, I got rid of about 3G of that, but there’s still a lot to go. So hopefully there will be new FeatherCast episodes in the next few days. Sounds like David has been recording some stuff too. Not sure which one(s) will get released first, but with ApacheCon US coming up real soon, there’s less need to ration them.

ApacheCon Asia summary

(I posted this to a certain non-public mailing list, but Nick suggested that I also publish it publically.)

I wanted to give a quick report about ApacheCon Asia 2006, now that I’m mostly recovered from traveling.

In short, it was a huge success. The attendance was as good as Europe, with far more non-committer attendees than we typically have in the US or Europe. There was a large delegation from a local highschool LUG, which I thought was amazingly cool. The related events (ApacheCon was part of a week of events called FOSSSL 06) drew a hugely diverse crowd, including numerous CEOs, many of whom were still in the “what is it” phase of Open Source knowledge.

The attendees were enthusiastic and eager to learn. It was a little hard to judge their reactions at times, because, as I discovered in later discussion, the local school system emphasizes the idea that asking questions or interrupting the “teacher” is hugely disrespectful. That takes some getting used to. But after-session discussions were enthusiastic and folks had good questions – just not many in the sessions themselves.

The “nearby” violence wasn’t particularly nearby, and didn’t affect things in the least – at least not as far as I can tell.

I was given a book entitled “Sri Lanka: The Emerald Island”, so it was pretty cool that ApacheCon was held on the Emerald Isle and the Emerald Island this year! 🙂

HUGE kudos to Sanjiva and his team, particularly Deepal Jayasinghe, who handled a lot of the logistics, and Rajkumar, who organized the GeekOut, which was the high point of the whole week, at least for me. But, of course, there were many other members of your team who I don’t want to overlook. Thanks for making this happen.

Sri Lanka is beautiful, and I’m delighted I got to visit. Sri Lanka has more Apache developers, per capita, than any other nation on earth. That aught to make you take notice. I don’t know if this stat is actually true, but I heard it quoted enough times, it *must* be! 😉

I left my clock in Sri Lanka

The last several days, I have been falling into bed exhausted at 9pm, and waking up refreshed and ready to go at 4am. I think I left my biological clock in Sri Lanka. I don’t recall ever having this much trouble readjusting to a timezone. But I suppose I’ve never been over that many timezones.

So, I’ve got about 5 more Sri Lanka episodes that I still need to write, which were … ahem … postponed by certain losers with nothing to better to do than deface my websites. Ah, well, it was time to rebuild the server anyway, so I suppose in a way it was a good thing. But it sure created a lot of additional work that I don’t have time for.

Which reminds me of a Goofy cartoon I saw on the plane on the way home. “Don’t end sentences with prepositions!” “What would I want to do that for?”

About to leave

I’ll be leaving Sri Lanka shortly, and my internet connection is probably going to expire any minute now.

As much as I’ve enjoyed being here, I’ve reached the point where I really just want to go home.

I still have a *lot* more stuff to write about, about my visit here, including all about elephants. But that can wait another day or two.

The future of (Open Source) software

It’s easy for us Open Source “experts” to go to various places around the world and impart our wisdom on the people there. But what I realized in the past week is that it’s really only a matter of time before they are telling us the best way to do Open Source. Not to mention that it’s just the wrong attitude to take, since it’s only when everyone are equal participants that the Open Source model really works.

Anyways, I need to stew on this a little longer, because there’s a lot to think about. Mostly, though, I tend to have rather negative reactions to any model that has “us” from the west teaching “them” from the developing world what the right way to do things is.

I finally figured out what WS02 is all about, and it seems that they grasp what Open Source is meant to be as a business model. They are a software company, and their product is Open Source. So they benefit from the contributions of folks around the world, and those folks benefit in return, but they are still able to run a profitable software company based on those efforts.

It occurred to me to make the (very unfair, but stick with me) comparison to ISPs in the USA who have based a business around the Apache web server. There are dozens of them. They sell services on top of an Open Source product, but in no way contribute back to the community that makes their business possible. Quite to the contrary, they do things that subtly work against it. My biggest pet peeve in this area is ISPs who have “documentation” on their website about how to run your hosted website. Granted, *some* of it is worthwhile, and some of it even links back to the relevant parts of the real documentation. But for the most part, ISP Apache documentation is full of inaccuracies, stuff that stopped being true in 1997, confusing phrasing, and misconceptions about best practice.

If we could get all of these documentation writers to participate in some small way in the actual Apache web server documentation project, contributing howtos and documentation patches, as well as correcting their own misconceptions, imagine the wealth of howtos and documentation we would have now.

But, instead, we have 48,000 howtos that tell you that authentication requires .htaccess files and “Limit GET POST” blocks. The sheer enormity of wasted effort staggers the mind.

Hmm. I seem to have gotten slightly off track. I was talking about the future of software.

Anyways, think about this. India is making a name for itself as a place to outsource development and support. So companies in the USA send their work to India, but the vision and plan is still coming out of the USA. Sri Lanka, on the other hand, is making a name for itself in Open Source software. Sri Lanka has a higher per-capita rate of Apache developers than any other nation on earth. And, Sri Lankans are driving the vision and plan for the entire Web Services suite of projects, in addition to participating in other projects.

In an industry where geography is uninportant, we’re going to see more and more powerhouse software companies coming out of developing nations where they grok Open Source as a business model in ways that we in the west don’t yet. I’m obviously not the first person to make this observation, but having see it first hand, it seems much more real to me. Sri Lanka and Brazil are the places to watch.

Geek Out, Saturday

On Saturday, the Geek Out experience continued, with an early breakfast – traditional Sri Lankan, and very good. Shortly after this, Danese showed up, and then a little later Ken arrived, with the T-shirts that had been left in Colombo.

We all piled in the bus, and headed for the raft landing, where helmets, life jackets, and paddles were handed out. Some guys from the hotel carried the rafts down a precariously steep set of stairs, and we trooped after. At the bottom, we piled into the rafts and took a test drive across the river to a beach on the other side.

Some of the crews were better than others. I won’t say which was which. 😉

After a brief instruction on how to row, we started down the river, going through rapids with delightful names like “head chopper” and “killer falls”. I haven’t had that much fun in a VERY long time. There are a variety of different photos floating about, and I’ll upload more once I get home. The bandwidth here is not really condusive to uploading multiple megabytes of photos.

High points include jumping off of a rock directly into the rapids, and then floating downstream from there, and seeing the spot where they blew up the bridge for the movie “Bridge over the river Kwai”. Now I need to see that again, as it has been a long time since I saw it last.

When we returned to Rafter’s Retreat, wet and bedraggled, we walked up the road to the lodge, incurring the wrath of more leeches. I’ve grown to really hate leeches. Lunch was ready soon, and then I was very ready for a nap.

But Danese and Dave wanted to play Werewolf, so we gathered in a circle to play Werewolf. Folks seemed to really enjoy the game, and take a deep pleasure in indulging the mob instinct for a while. I wasn’t a werewolf.

More than half of the folks left on Saturday evening, leaving the rest of us to brave it out for one more evening. Most of us were exhausted and turned in early. We didn’t have any particular plans for the next day other than heading back to Colombo, but we wanted the relaxation of hanving out in the jungle for another night.