[lug] [CLUE-Talk] OSCON report, Wed 7/25 (fwd)

[J. Wayde Allen]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 09:18:40 -0600
From: Tom Poindexter <tpoindex at nyx.net>
Reply-To: clue-talk at clue.denver.co.us
To: cluetalk <clue-talk at clue.denver.co.us>
Subject: [CLUE-Talk] OSCON report, Wed 7/25


The day started off with two keynote speakers, Fred Baker from Cisco, and
W. Phillip Moore from Morgan Stanley Dean Witter.   Baker has been key in
defining Internet standards while at Cisco.  Moore is a system admin (or
'Infrastructure Architect', as he likes to be called) for M/S/D/W.

Baker's speech was titled "Will the Next Generation Internet
Still Depend on Open Source?"  Baker started out reviewing
the important open source pieces of software that made the current
Internet- BIND, Sendmail, GCC, etc.  Talked about how corporations
might be leary of Open Source- CISCO uses GCC for all of their
products, but uses in-house libraries rather than available GNU C lib due
by restating Open Source needs partnership with corporate users, again
focusing on consumer products.

Moore was up next, and his speech was titled "An Open Source
Success Story on Wall Street."
Moore's talk couldn't be more opposed to Baker's.  Moore started out by
saying *all* wall street companies use Open Source in some way, whether
they publically acknowledge it or not (just like a lot of companies.)
Moore stated that companies must craft their enterprise software, it's not
just something you can go to CompUSA and buy off the shelf.  The big languages
at M/S/D/W are C++, Java, and Perl, with lesser amounts of Tcl/Tk.  The
beginnings of using Open Source software at his company started when the
company hired PhD's and engineers to build their now current trading systems.
They brought in Unix, and early Open Source software to get their jobs
done.  The early adopted langauges were Perl & Tcl/Tk, driving a Sybase
database.  Moore also pointed aout waht many of us know, but corporate
managers have no clue about: that open source support can many times be
better than a pricey support contract from a commercial software vendor.
The 800 number may give a warm fuzzy to managers, but likely can be
useless when techies need to solve problems.  Moore also points out
that commercial software vendors want you to 'innovate' on top of their
software, to guarantee a revenue stream.  Moore finished by saying that
Open Source software has a bright future at M/S/D/W and predicted that
some commercial software will move to Open Source alternative, based on
performance and on price.  He also mentioned that Open Source helps to
reduce risk, by making it impossible for a piece of software to loose
support when a vendor folds their business.

They remainder of the day were technical sessions (whew! so many), and
BoF's at night.  I focused on the Tcl/Tk conference track.  Michael McLenan
gave the keynote "Living with my Tcl Addiction", which humorously traces
his introduction to Tcl and how it has become a tool of choice.  McLenan
ended his talk with a demo of a new CAD design tool he has been writing
for Cadence, 'SignalScan', which allows chip designers views on waveforms
and timings from data collected on chip designs.  It's fully written in
Tcl/Tk with some custom widgets to view the waveforms, and will replace
a legacy product that took 30 man-years to develop.

Other notable sessions:
-I attended Miguel de Icaza's talke on Mono, the
Open Source alternative to Microsoft's .NET.  Mono strives to be source
code compatible with .NET, and hopes to be binary compatible as well.
This involves building a C# compiler based on GCC's GJC (java frontend),
but uses code generation backend from LCC (LBURG), as well as a class
library.  He pointed out that the CLI, Common Language Interpreter, is more
like a parse tree from a compiler, rather than a byte code stream (e.g. java).
 
-I also attend Tcl session on mod_websh and the Kinetic Application Processor.
Both are Apache modules to expose a Tcl interpreter in either Apache 2.0
threads, or process based.
 
-BoF's:  ActiveTcl: from Activestate.  Jeff Hobbs and Andreas Kupries
are the lead developers for Activestate's distribution of Tcl, with many extras included.
Wireless 802.11b Hacking: talked about innovative ways to use 802.11b 
networking cards and access points to build point to point connections over
5-20 miles, and building community networks by having open access points.

-Tom

-- 
Tom Poindexter
tpoindex at nyx.net
http://www.nyx.net/~tpoindex/
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