The past 24 hours have flown by so quickly here at LinuxCon and CloudOpen in San Diego. We had some serious laughs as the Linux kernel developer panel took the stage Wednesday afternoon, sailed to Qualcomm Innovation Center’s fun party at the Bali Hai Restaurant and saw more great speakers Thursday morning from Qualcomm, Facebook and Twitter.
Intel, Canonical and Kernel Panel Keynotes
The Wednesday afternoon keynotes began with Imad Sousou, Director of the Intel Open Source Technology Center with a talk focused on Web technologies and the role of Linux at Intel. There are two big challenges to writing and running applications on the Web, Sousou said. First, there is no standard API; Web standards have so far been focused on the browser, he said. And second, performance at the graphics layer. It’s still difficult to get a Web application to perform with the same fluidity as a native application, he said. Intel is working on open source solutions to both of these big challenges.
Sousou was followed by Kyle MacDonald, vice president of cloud at Canonical, who discussed the many partners Ubuntu is working with to implement the OpenStack cloud platform. The company is focused on finding solutions for deploying large-scale applications on the cloud using its open source Juju tool.
The afternoon wrapped up with the Linux Kernel Developer Panel, moderated by SCSI subsystem maintainer James Bottomley. The panelists cracked jokes and answered questions from the audience with a steady stream of entertaining and informative banter.
When Intel kernel developer Sarah Sharp suggested that a mentoring program would help attract younger developers to work on the kernel, for example, Bottomley asked kernel creator Linus Torvalds who he would mentor.
Torvalds had a quick reply: “We don’t want to scare away even more young people.”
Linux Foundation Fellow Greg Kroah-Hartman pointed out that the Kernel Summit is more about process than technical solutions so it doesn’t appeal as much to developers. And Ted Ts’o, a kernel developer at Google, suggested holding more technical workshops at the Summit to attract developers. (For more details of the kernel developer panel, see our live blog transcript from Wednesday.)
Qualcomm, Facebook and Twitter Keynotes
Rob Chandhok of Qualcomm began the Thursday morning keynotes with a talk about mobile connectivity. The huge growth in the number of Internet connected devices — including laptops, phones, sensors and appliances — and their proliferation across the globe is creating new issues in providing fast, secure access to the Web. Qualcomm is asking: how will these devices all communicate with each other? The company’s AllJoyn open source project is trying to create a platform and standards for this “Internet of things,” Chandhok said.
Facebook’s Amir Michael spoke next on the Open Compute open source hardware initiative. Open source components to the cloud can be found at all levels, except the hardware layer, Michael said. He advocated for companies to join the open source hardware movement in order to speed the pace of innovation, increase efficiency and reduce the environmental footprint of cloud computing.
And wrapping up the morning keynotes was Chris Aniszczyk, open source manager at Twitter. He gave a behind-the-scenes look at the open source technology that lies behind each tweet and spoke of his company’s desire to be more involved in the the open source community. For more on the Thursday morning keynotes, see our live blog transcript.