SCALE and Zumastore 2
I’m spending this weekend at SCALE. As always, the conference is great, and better than the year before. The talks are spilling out in to the halls, often multiple talks at a time (right now Chris DiBona’s talk has so many people attending and the spill over is so great, that it makes more sense to catch the mp3 of it at a later date).
One of the coolest things so far was my friend Daniel Phillips’ announcement of the Zumastor project. It looks like this Google sponsored open source project is finally going to give Network Appliances some real open source competition.
I was intrigued by a presentation on SystemTap. This is the first system I’ve seen that looks like it can give DTrace a run for the money, and most importantly it runs on Linux. It isn’t all there yet, but it’s close enough I’m going to start playing with it.
I was also impressed to see the Squeak folks making an appearance, both with a booth and a BoF later tonight. Looks like that project still has a decent amount of momentum.
Sun had a presentation talking about their open source stack (software and hardware). It was fun listening to just how much Sun gets the message that just five years ago I thought was falling on deaf ears there. It was also neat seeing a graph from a study that was done showing who was contributing to open source. Sun is the clear leader in terms of the amount of code and total man hours they’ve contributed (multiples of what most others have done). People don’t always grok that.
UPDATE: Found the study on who contributes to open source. Thanks to Matt Ingenthron (who did the presentation at SCALE) for getting me a pointer even before his slides make it out to the SCALE web site.
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Is Sun multiples ahead in absolute terms, or per-head? Because, last time I checked, Sun had a lot more developers on staff than most companies.
Sun is multiples ahead in absolute terms. I don’t know about per head, but I have to imagine there are some open source companies (particularly consulting companies) with impressive ratios for that.
Sun does have a lot more developers on staff than most companies. However, a number of open sources biggest “supporters” are companies with an even larger staff. IBM has an order of magnitude more employees than Sun (not sure how that plays out on the developer side, but I’d wager it still works out to a heck of a lot more). HP has about 4x as many, even Cisco and Oracle have significantly more employees. On the chart I saw, Sun was like 3x IBM, and IBM was like 2x more than whoever was third on the list, and the numbers flattened out a bit after that. HP was nowhere to be seen. I’ll see if I can find the study, but it did highlight the differences between talking about open source and actually doing something about it. I think few in the open source community fully appreciate Sun’s role in the community. I used to work there, and I while wasn’t entirely surprised Sun was #1, but I was shocked by how wide a margin it was.