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.