How Open Source Projects Survive Poisonous People

Every open source project runs into people who are selfish, uncooperative, and disrespectful. These people can silently poison the atmosphere of a happy developer community. Come learn how to identify these people and peacefully de-fuse them before they derail your project. Told through a series of (often amusing) real-life anecdotes and experiences

Revolution OS

Revolution OS is a 2001 documentary which traces the history of GNU, Linux, and the open source and free software movements. It features ... alle » several interviews with prominent hackers and entrepreneurs (and hackers-cum-entrepreneurs), including Richard Stallman, Michael Tiemann, Linus Torvalds, Larry Augustin, Eric S. Raymond, Bruce Perens, Frank Hecker and Brian Behlendorf.

The film begins in medias res with an IPO, and then sets the historical stage by showing the beginnings of software development back in the day when software was shared on paper tape for the price of the paper itself. It then segues to Bill Gates's Open Letter to Hobbyists in which he asks Computer Hobbyists to not share, but to buy software. (This letter was written by Gates when Microsoft was still based in Arizona and spelled "Micro-Soft".) Richard Stallman then explains how and why he left the MIT Lab for Artificial Intelligence in order to devote his life to the development of free software, as well as how he started with the GNU project.

Linus Torvalds is interviewed on his development of the Linux kernel as well as on the GNU/Linux naming controversy and Linux's further evolution, including its commercialization.

Richard Stallman remarks on some of the ideological aspects of open source vis-á-vis Communism and capitalism and well as on several aspects of the development of GNU/Linux.

Michael Tiemann (interviewed in a desert) tells how he met Stallman and got an early version of Stallman's GCC and founded Cygnus Solutions.

Larry Augustin tells how he combined the resulting GNU software and a normal PC to create a UNIX-like Workstation which cost one third the price of a workstation by Sun Microsystems even though it was three times as powerful. His narrative includes his early dealings with venture capitalists, the eventual capitalization and commodification of Linux for his own company, VA Linux, and ends with its IPO.

Frank Hecker of Netscape tells how Netscape executives released the source code for Netscape's browser, one of the signal events which made Open Source a force to be reckoned with by business executives, the mainstream media, and the public at large.

(this text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License)

iClaustron: Open Source Grid Cluster Storage Controller

Google Tech Talks October 17, 2006

Mikael Ronstrom has a Ph.D in technical information systems. He is the founder of the technology in ... all » NDB Cluster, the storage engine of MySQL Cluster. Lately he developed the Partitioning feature in MySQL 5.1. He has a long background from the telecom industry with many innovative solutions developed. Currently he works as an open source consultant at iClaustron AB and spends also some time on some new ideas in the area of clustered storage systems.

ABSTRACT Many applications has requirements to store petabytes of base data and many terabytes of structured data. Examples of this are genealogy, astronomy, biotech and so forth. This talk will discuss requirements from the genealogy application and show how this requirements requires building very large clustered systems with an hierarchy of clusters. These clusters are used to both store base data and structured data. He goes on to show how these requirements translate into a systems architecture with essential components of off-the shelf servers, cheap storage, clustered software and integrated cluster interconnects.

Using open source tools for performance testing

Google London Test Automation Conference (LTAC) Google Tech Talks September 8th, 2006 Presenter: Goranka Bjedov