A report from Red Hat Summit
Seeing Red
We sum up this year's Red Hat Summit, which was held in June in Boston, Massachusetts.
Some conferences feel like going home because you see lots of people you know but have not seen for a long time. The Red Hat Summit [1], held in Boston, Massachusetts, in June felt like this because a lot of the people I worked with at Digital Equipment Corporation's Unix group now work for Red Hat Software, including Brian Stevens, Red Hat's Chief Technology Officer.
Keynotes
Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO of Red Hat, kicked off the event and talked about a patent settlement that he said is "truly consistent with GPL, protecting all upstream and downstream developers." In addition, he spoke about a Red Hat initiative to create "Liberation fonts," a set of free and open fonts to allow for truly open documents, that would render the same as their non-free counterparts because the fonts could be digitally equivalent. He also touched on the economics of free software, pointing out that if we could "capture" the software written in-house and make it available to other programmers, we could obtain the advantages of software re-use.
John Halamka, CIO of Harvard Medical School and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center talked about open record formats and standards so that medical communities can share patients' records in a safe and secure manner. He also advocated e-prescribing, although only 13 percent of Massachusetts prescriptions are sent electronically. As a diabetic who travels a lot, I can vouch for the need for prescriptions that can be transferred easily between pharmacies.
Jim Stallings from IBM spoke next and stressed that the global enterprise is changing to meet new demands – billions of systems are now talking to each other. He estimated that by 2010, medical images will make up 30 percent of the world's storage, and 74 percent of the world's mobile subscribers will live in emerging economies. To meet this challenge, Jim estimated that 70 percent of the world's global 1,000 Organizations must revamp their computer centers because of energy costs in the next five years. According to Jim, companies can typically save 40 percent of their energy costs, and the return on investment is typically less than two years.
Finally, Joel Cohen, the co-creator of The Simpsons, talked about collaboration, originality, and how even bad ideas could spark good ones.
Getting Technical
The event was not all keynotes, and many of Red Hat's engineering staff were on hand to give technical talks. Rik van Riel, creator of the "Kernel Newbies" site [2], discussed why the hardware is getting faster but seems to be getting slower. According to Rik, the tasks that we ask the CPUs to do are getting larger faster than the hardware is getting faster. With these issues are trade-offs around power management for saving electricity and cooling and issues around single-thread versus multi-thread performance. A follow-on conversation disclosed that a lot of programmers today are not learning the techniques necessary in multi-thread programming to keep up with the software needs on multi-core systems.
Another talk I liked was on the oVirt project [3], cross-platform virtualization management software utilizing open interfaces to manage any number of nodes. oVirt was designed as a framework with a set of APIs to manage various hypervisors with an integrated policy, security, and audit framework.
FudCon
My only criticism of the event was the high price to attend. Granted, it was worth the money, but a lot of people just don't have it to spend right now. For these people, the free FudCon was held in the same building on Thursday and Friday, and moved to a university on Saturday. At FudCon, members of the Fedora and Red Hat communities could come together to work on projects, ask questions, and otherwise find answers. Also, they got a chance to talk to Jim Whitehurst, who gave much the same talk as he did in his keynote, in addition to joking with the participants and telling them his experiences with downloading and installing Fedora.
In his talks, Jim noted several times that Red Hat could not possibly survive without the efforts of the Fedora and FOSS communities, which was good for the FudCon attendees to hear. Furthermore, Jim did not run out of the meeting after giving his talk, as I have seen other CEOs do; instead, he stayed and talked with the participants, which bodes well for Red Hat's future.
Overall, the Red Hat Summit was a great event.
Infos
- Red Hat Summit: http://www.redhat.com/promo/summit/2008/
- Kernel Newbies: http://www.kernelnewbies.org
- oVirt: http://ovirt.org/
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
OSJH and LPI Release 2024 Open Source Pros Job Survey Results
See what open source professionals look for in a new role.
-
Proton 9.0-1 Released to Improve Gaming with Steam
The latest release of Proton 9 adds several improvements and fixes an issue that has been problematic for Linux users.
-
So Long Neofetch and Thanks for the Info
Today is a day that every Linux user who enjoys bragging about their system(s) will mourn, as Neofetch has come to an end.
-
Ubuntu 24.04 Comes with a “Flaw"
If you're thinking you might want to upgrade from your current Ubuntu release to the latest, there's something you might want to consider before doing so.
-
Canonical Releases Ubuntu 24.04
After a brief pause because of the XZ vulnerability, Ubuntu 24.04 is now available for install.
-
Linux Servers Targeted by Akira Ransomware
A group of bad actors who have already extorted $42 million have their sights set on the Linux platform.
-
TUXEDO Computers Unveils Linux Laptop Featuring AMD Ryzen CPU
This latest release is the first laptop to include the new CPU from Ryzen and Linux preinstalled.
-
XZ Gets the All-Clear
The back door xz vulnerability has been officially reverted for Fedora 40 and versions 38 and 39 were never affected.
-
Canonical Collaborates with Qualcomm on New Venture
This new joint effort is geared toward bringing Ubuntu and Ubuntu Core to Qualcomm-powered devices.
-
Kodi 21.0 Open-Source Entertainment Hub Released
After a year of development, the award-winning Kodi cross-platform, media center software is now available with many new additions and improvements.