Black Duck Blog

Phil Odence
Vice President of Business Development
podence@blackducksoftware.com
The “new pragmatism” that we’ve been sensing whenever we get out to industry events was also evident at the LinuxCon 2009. Although incredibly passionate, the Linux community seems little interested in religious debates. There were a few jabs at Microsoft, but so too was Richard Stallman the brunt of a couple of jokes. On the question of give and take of open source, Linus was quoted as saying something like, “There are no parasites, only future contributors.”

Passions were more directed at the practicality of getting things done. When on a panel and asked about the best feature added to Linux this year, Linus said it wasn’t a functionality he was happiest with, it was a step improvement in the Linux development process. In fact, there was a lot of discussion about managing the complexities of community development and the parallels to distributed development in organizations. The Linux Foundation’s Ted Ts’o (a subsystem maintainer) shared an interesting vignette about talking to a chief architect at Microsoft and being struck by how similar development works in the bowels of Windows.

Several companies spoke pretty freely about their own internal processes clearly evidencing what we call multi-source development and the governance/compliance challenges that come with it. IBM’s OSS head, Bob Sutor, candidly mentioned that even at his company (which is as sophisticated in this area as any) open source use is growing so rapidly that they need to retool to their 4th generation of governance process. Esteban Rockett and John Ellis focused a session on the evolution Motorola has gone through in this area and mentioned Black Duck as a key tool for them.

The most fun session was a keynote by Noah Broadwater, VP of IS at Sesame Workshop. Accompanied by Elmo and Cookie Monster dolls, he talked about the incredible work they are doing for kids around the world. They are able to pull it off on a shoestring thanks to the leverage of open source in development. With a total IT staff of 13 (mostly customer support and including only 2 developers) they’ve built a world-class educational website with Liferay, Alfresco and MySQL on top of SUSE that recently won an Emmy! (http://bit.ly/UcY7f) Very impressive and inspiring. Keep your eyes on the Google logo on Nov 10, Big Bird’s 40th birthday.