Live from San Diego: Red Hat Summit 2007

Keynote by Matthew Szulik, CEO, Red Hat

Red Hat’s annual summit started off with great optimism from its CEO Matthew Szulik. In his opening keynote (Download), Szulik highlighted the vastness of the impact of open source on the world we live in from the state of Kerala in India to the giant telecom industry. Kerala is using open source to drive down illiteracy. The global telecom industry is deploying open source service delivery platforms. Now is an exciting time to witness these advancements. Szulik talked about open source as a driver to help maintain transparency which is key to the democratic process whether for voting or for legal systems. He exclaimed the urgent need for low-cost tools for education to change dynamics across the world and thereby reduce the threat of terror. His passion and commitment around all things open source resonated across the three days of sessions, meetings and networking.

Keynote by Brian Stevens, CTO, Red Hat

Other keynoters included Henri Richard of AMD, David Pakman of eMusic and Derek Chan of Dreamworks. Richard committed to open sourcing ATI graphics drivers. Pakman claimed no-DRM was the only way for entertainment content to be accepted widely in the new digital markets. Chan highlighted the pervasive use of Linux in producing animated movies and the impact that virtualization is having on the next generation of digital productions. Red Hat CTO Brian Stevens keynoted (Download) about how Red Hat has been inspired by customer-driven innovation. Customers have pushed Red Hat’s open source developers to invent new ways to meet their needs. He discussed how online desktops are the wave of the future and how collaborative sharing among peers is changing the desktop model. He highlighted OLPC’s impact through its new desktop paradigm Sugar and surveyed other ideas that are revolutionizing the way data and services will be provided to the user. Eben Moglen’s legal oratory had crowds spilling over as he summarized the status of GPLv3 and the impact of patents on innovation and the open source ecosystem.

Team India at the Summit

India was well represented with LIOs (”Luminaries of Indian OSS”) — Dr. Deepak Phatak, chair professor at IIT Bombay, Nandu Pradhan, the new leader of Red Hat India, and Shankar Iyer, Chairman’s Award winner, of Red Hat India. Other Indian technologists demonstrated strong representation from the subcontinent. Dr. Phatak, in surveying the state of open source in India, passionately argued for the need for open source and explained its potential to change the lives of many. Nandu Pradhan, highlighted contributions made to RHEL5’s roll-out by the Indian team. He also talked about the high expectations for a Red Hat global support center just announced in April by Charlie Peters, CFO of Red Hat and the success of the Red Hat Challenge in drawing more than 180 entries from India.

Market driven innovation

Interesting announcements in Red Hat’s strategy and development of the open source marketplace included Red Hat Exchange, support for para-virtualization support in Linux for Windows and release of the Liberation Fonts.

On the desktop front, the company’s direction seems to be long-term and multi-pronged with different projects supporting requirements for different markets.

Red Hat’s Global Desktop packages productivity applications such as OpenOffice, Evolution and Firefox to provide a fully supported desktop platform. This product is being distributed primarily by Intel’s global channel in the BRIC nations.

The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project, started at MIT, showcased Red Hat as the prime software developer. OLPC is an initiative for kids in developing countries. It is aimed at providing a new framework and tools for the education of children in Asia, Latin America and Africa. In an one-on-one conversation Chris Blizzard, OLPC project lead for Red Hat, he talked about OLPC’s progress and technology breakthroughs being achieved on OLPC which would influence the desktop profoundly. He also emphasized that OLPC is a true open source project. Everything from the BIOS upwards is open with the exception of a mesh network driver for the Marvell networking chipset. Any community can use the OLPC software, add content for it, and educate with it without barriers to entry. Some grass-root organizations in Nepal have done exactly that and are currently adapting the system to local language requirements as well as to their own national curriculum.

Red Hat also revealed their plans for an Online Desktop with Mugshot. The Online Desktop provides a network-aware approach to address the needs of individual users whether they are college students, home users or small businesses. These users are increasingly taking advantage of the power of online applications such as Google Docs, GMail, Flickr, YouTube and Meebo in their day to day lives. Havoc Pennington described how a desktop that is not connected to the Internet is unthinkable to a whole generation today. Many people practically live “online” — using their desktop as an Internet front-end, with very few offline applications.

Advanced technologies such as virtualization, now fully integrated in RHEL5, and “Trusted Linux” with EAL4+ security were detailed across many sessions by key developers from Red Hat and other organizations such as IBM, AMD as well as customers.

Fedora 7

The upcoming release of Fedora 7, scheduled for May 31st, is generating great expectations. Key features in Fedora include the Live CD, DVD, USB and custom distro spins. The Live CD was demonstrated in the technical sessions by David Zeuthen. A rich toolchain for distro creation including Pungi and Revisor will be part of Fedora 7. Jeremy Katz presented the latest in Yum, Jesse Keating talked about Pungi - a release tool, Jonathan Stefan talked about Revisor - a tool to install customized versions of Fedora. Virtualization technologies such as KVM, Xen and Qemu will also be in this release. In an one-on-one conversation with Max Spevack, Fedora Project Board Chair, Spevack talked about the improvements in Fedora’s project management as well as roadmaps for Fedora 7 and future releases.

Party at San Diego Aerospace Museum

Sun, Sand and Open Source

The Summit drew about 1400 developers, system administrators, customers, partners and press - a full house. Most sessions were standing room only. With Wi-Fi all over, tasty munchies during breaks and great talks, the gathering was a sure hit. Global faces from Asia, Latin America, Europe networked, interacted and enjoyed food for the mind and body with the backdrop of the gorgeous San Diego harbor and fantastic weather. Among the many parties in the evenings, AMD’s party at the San Diego Aerospace Museum topped the charts with a super location, live band, great food and merry revelers.