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I just reached OSCON website and I discovered that this summer, from July 20 to 24, 2009, there is an exciting party!

The OSCON is a famous annual event, dedicated to the Open Source "movement", held by publisher O’Reilly Media and sponsored by some great industry names like intel and Google.

O’Reilly is the good guys that somehow sponsored the creation of the famous Linux Network Administrator Guide (that unfortunately I still had no time to finish…). They may also be considered "innovators" from the point of view of book licenses, since they kinda invented "Open Books", a precious pearl of knowledge on the web, now released as Creative Commons (check and download from here: http://oreilly.com/openbook/ ).

This year, OSCON (Open Source CONvention) is held at the heart of the Silicon Valley, on sunny San Jose, CA, place known also as intel’s HQ.

Well, intel may not have a lot to party, since EU Commission just fined them an incredible €. 1.06 billion, but other than that, intel demonstrated a lot of open intents, like kernel mode-setting key-aspects contribution, unbelievable boot times for netbooks (see moblin.org and Samsung netbook bootup youtube video) and other interesting technological goodnesses. 

OSCON is not just tons of conferences, it’s also where interesting open source projects gains (deserved) mainstream visibility, so Sourceforge.net readied the "Community Choice Awards", a program aimed at allowing you to push your favorite open source project up. Through that site you can nominate the open source projects you like the most and then hope they get selected and presented at the OSCON.

Nominations will be accepted until May 29th, so you are still in time to nominate your favorite projects too! Winners will be declared July 23rd. Note you can cast one vote for every category, and since there are 12 categories, you can wisely choose 12 projects!

Here are some of my favorite 2009 open source projects.

Best Commercial Open Source Project: Alfresco Labs

Best Project for the Enterprise: vtiger

Most Likely to Change the Way You Do Everything: jfusion

This is upcoming and shocking news for the UNIX-world, DB-World, Virtualization-World, Enterprise-software-world, developers-world …

Essentially, the future IT world, is going to be influenced by the choices made by another big software giant like ORACLE, today a SUN-illuminated ORACLE.

The April 20 2009 ORACLE-SUN acquisition is probably going to change the IT World, this is almost a matter of fact, since now ORACLE is becoming the de-facto biggest sponsor and contributor of the open source world.

Till now, ORACLE pursued the "Microsoft way": cleansing and purging every possible competitor, with big bucks (and it seems they largely succeeded with their former acquisitions).

At present, ORACLE made a new demonstration: successful open source can be "bought", even if it is a direct competitor (probably because successful open source moves a lot of money?).

I don’t feel comfortable to argue about the future, but it’s just natural to think about the LAMP-stack, and if it is going to become LAPP-stack in the future!

But I suspect ORACLE plans aren’t to kill mySQL, maybe they’ll relegate it to a "developers experiment", with an "enterprise version", who knows?

ORACLE seem actively involved in the open source, with btrfs filesystem development and previous contributions to ext4, but here I also see two possibly-related projects: ZFS and btrfs. What road will ORACLE choose to pursue?

Another interesting overlapping project is virtualization: ORACLE pushes XEN, and SUN have its own XEN setup on Solaris, so they’ll probably merge the two, but what will happen to virtualbox is not known (SUN acquired innotek and made its own Xvm Virtualbox virtualization solution for the desktop and the workstations): another important choice for ORACLE here.

Another interesting and debatable argument is licenses: it seems now a matter of GPL vs CDDL, and probably ORACLE will have to make some important choices even on this field.

Other than that, my personal concern is non-existant, since I have no direct nor indirect and am in no way related to any (I’m just a GNU/Linux power user): for me they’re two big companies merging, one heavily hit by the downturn and the other still sane, so, for me, this merger is probably a good thing; also, maybe the one makin’money will teach the other how to better monetize, whatever it will cost.

P.S.: I will still sporadically read Jonathan Schwartz’s illuminated blog, given the new situation.

Thanks to the community effort, debian 5 was finally born.

This is a stable release, code name "lenny", continuing the debian toy story naming tradition.

With this release, there are a lot of changes, well, not the kind of changes you would expect from a modern .6 Ubuntu desktop refresh, because one of the developer’s aim is the combination of hardware and software stability (and so in fact the debian developers deliberately pick packages one by one and test them a lot, before releasing to the public), but it is, by the way, a message about "we are confident on those packages and we can build up on those".

Before this release, lenny was referred to as "testing" on the debian repository, now it has become "stable".

Debian is useful for System integrators, System Administrators and others interested on building something on top of it (generally servers), since the distribution is very prone to customization, it’s normal to see packages like kernel 2.6.26, X.Org 7.3, K (KDE) 3.5.10, GNOME 2.22.2 etc.

Don’t look at them like old packages, those packages are really and thorougly tested and debugged. If you really need a linux-based, fully featured desktop distribution, get Ubuntu instead: it is built around debian and the next minor update is going to offer some intersting new features and improvements; you may also wish to try debian squeeze (if you are a debugger/developer) or sid (if you are seriously confident with linux); you can do so just by editing /etc/apt/sources.list and changing all the "stable" keywords instances to "testing" for squeeze or "unstable" for sid (this is the edge of the edge of the new stuff, but dependencies sometime happen to break).

I suggest you to try debian64 for server-like production tasks and experiments; download debian from torrent sites to relieve some traffic from official servers and remember that, if you can spare some bucks, support the debian community by donating (especially if you make money on top of it).

Welcome debian stable!

SUN ‘s Virtualbox virtualization solution is a respected open source virtualization product, wich today received a major update, reaching version 2.1, dated 2008-12-17 (see here for changelog).

This new version brings, other than the usual (and abundant) bug fixes, major upgrades for the MAC OS X port, like 64 bit guest OS support and Hardware Virtualization support (VT-x and AMD-V); other new features are Nehalem core i7 virtualization enhancements, native VMDK/VHD support (VMWARE hard disk images and MS Virtual PC disk images), including snapshots, Experimental 3D Acceleration via OpenGL and (for me this is by far the most desirable update),  a New Host Interface Networking implementations for Windows and Linux hosts with easier setup (replaces TUN/TAP on Linux and manual bridging on Windows).

Finally SUN figured a way to get rid of this ugly thing. Thanks engineers!

If you already use it, chances are you’ll be automatically notified when the update is ready, else, proceed to Sun’s VirtualBox official website, choose your version and manually start the download.

EDIT: image updated: it was overlapping.

Great news from Free and Open Source World!

As you all may know, Mozilla Foundation Inc. anticipated some time ago the download day event, with the objective to set a new guiness world record, by becoming the most downloaded software on 24 hours (the objective was set at 5 million downloads). Actual numbers seem speaking for themselves: 7,937,004+ Downloads (and still counting at the time of this writing).

From Netscape to Mozilla to Firefox, the people behind the scenes, are demonstrating the world that Open Source Software can take the lead and seriously drive the software industry with competence (and now with numbers). Today browsers war is no more on features (for this there are plugins), but on efficiency and standards compliance, and I must admit the improvements are genuine.

Yesterday and today I made my bit by downloading it from home, from office and spreading the word with my colleagues. Thanks Mozilla ;P

On another subject, wine devs reached a milestone: after almost fifteen years (yes, that is a lot), of hard work, they released the most anticipated wine-1.0 release. This is also good news, because, when at some point in time Microsoft would drop support for their legacy OSes (like Win 98), there won’t be possibility to keep that software running. I know, today may sound insane using this plain old software, but wine is more than that: we can also play DirectX 9 video games via wine.

Though I must admit I can’t have full Windows XP performance with wine (as a personal, and not scientifically demonstrable rule, I consider full 1600×1200 XP performance equivalent to full 1400×900 performance with wine), I hope someday GPUs (such as the new Geforce GTX 280), will become enough powerful to allow me to play my favourite videogames @ 30+ fps under wine, using my native lcd res (on my case 1920×1200, maybe "next" nVIDIA die shrink @ .55nm will do).

Since I’m on the HW scene, I wish to express perplexity about the "new" intel Atom processors: their performance are a dinosaur jump back to past. On the HW upgrade italian forum I criticized the design by expressing my pov: they’re not so exciting (even some intel engineers seemed to dislike that stuff, I’ve read it on an article somewhere @ ars). I mean, the concept is great and all, but forget good multitasking performance!

Hopefully nVIDIA, AMD, and, who knows, maybe Apple, will come to something more appealing by the time this new market is born (intel also seems to have plans for a future dual-core Atom…ouch!). After all, I consider the market as a great buffet: before eating, I’ll wait the dinner table to be full, then I’ll choose what would better fit.

That’s all from my (new!) news section.