This conference is special for me. It has been one of the first big FLOSS conference WW to which I’ve been accepted as a speaker. It was in Sidney in 2007 and that was also an opportunity to organize the first and unique WW MondoRescue meeting (we were 2 !!). And I keep a strong feeling about that presentation and the australian way of life I really appreciated a lot.
Then I was luck to be selected again two more times in 2013 and 2014 in Canberra and Perth for a cross-distribution miniconf I organized there and a talk on project-builder.org. Again great travels and events so well organized and allowing to meet all the greatest FLOSS contributors. Just a dream !
Watch out the agenda to compute the correct time for it in your timezone (yes it will be late for the 2 of us based in France), but that’s a fair price to pay to be honored to contribute to one of the most interesting conference on FLOSS (with Fosdem !).
For those of you reading articles on this blog, this is not completely a new info. Indeed, during Fosdem, it was already possible to see a demo unit of a HPE ProLiant DL 360 running Linuxboot and an iLO 5 running an OpenBMC software stack.
But that was a proof of concept. Now, HPE has officially announced on the OpenBMC mailing list that we were contributing to the project and will bring our patches upstream, and help the community build a better software stack. I supppose that in particular our knowledge of the Redfish standard will be helpful to improve the project.
And more over, if your company is interested to test such a combination, feel free to contact Jean-Marie Verdun, Mike Garrett (both writers in the thread and promoters of this internally) or myself and we should be able to provide to you an access to such a system.
But that’s not all, we’re also…. hum, well you’ll know when it’s offically announced 🙂
Anyway, that’s the best news for our Open Source involvement since monthes and I’m glad that we’re making that possibility a reality for all the customers we have wanting a more open platform.
As usual Fosdem was crowdy. On Saturday, I decided to not try to enter in the container Devroom (whose queue was insane), and went instead to the Legal Devroom. This year, they decided to change their organisation and to have debates between people defending contrary positions (should licenses reflect ethical aspects, are the 4 freedoms too old, …)
Legal Devroom at Fosdem 2020
Unfortunately, as they didn’t manage to have people really having different opinions on the topics, it sounded a bit artificial sometimes, and didn’t really allow to enter more deeply in the subject, as a more classical roundtable would have allowed. 4 debates were probably too much, and having 1 or 2 (with real oponents, but respecting each other) and 2 or 3 round tables would probably be a better balance. Anyway, was even fun sometimes (can you believe that from a large set of lawyers ;-)) I passed the day in that room, where you could seat without issue and have good content.
One of the debates was around Bill of Material (BoM) vs source code delivery. And I really thought they didn’t go into enough details. Because it’s very difficult to reproduce software. And while BoM is hard to automate, and mostly useful for corporations that want to reduce risks (what they think BTW), providing the source, isn’t sufficient either. First as the GPL rightly points out, it’s not enough. You also need to provide the receipes to build the software. A Makefile e.g. helps a lot building the code the correct way. But what about the docs, the design schemas, the versions of the tools needed to build (or tested successfully contrary to others , gcc v5 vs 8 vs 10 ?), the precise versions of the dependencies (where doing npm install e.g. defeats tracking IMO) as you can only ensure that your software is working on a very specific environment (and reproduceable builds are linked to that). So clearly neither providing the sources + build files is sufficient, neither the BoM as it rarely provides all the required details, and would be a nightmare to reproduce, which creates an interesting challenge that shouldn’t be minimized when the produced software runs in a train, plane, or medical equipment of course. Which can lead you to re-read the excellent trusting the trust !
What they should also do is invite more european lawyers, as they are underrepresented, and some topics – author’s right vs copyright, EU law vs US law are not well enough taken in account IMHO. Contacting the ones behind EOLE would be a good start.
La Grande Place de Bruxelles, lieu des agapes nocturnes 😉
The evening is of course what most fosdemers like, because it’s time to meet again with friends you don’t see that often and enjoy beer (for the ones who like that !) and for me rather carbonade, wafles and more over chocolate 😉 As often, it was great to have dinner with Anne and Erwan (Kernel Receipes managers among other stuffs) and some of their friends. It always makes insightful discussions.
On Sunday, I decided to walk around and explore booths (I was needing some stickers for a new laptop !) which is a nice pretext to meet more relatives or make new ones ! Of course, each time I try to discuss with my fellow grenoblers (Vates, Algoo), or the french mafia, which lead me this year to … an HPE booth 🙂
LinuxBoot on a HPE ProLiant server DL 360 Gen10+ Beta
As Jean-Marie Verdun is back at HPE, he is also helping us with initiatives around LinuxBoot on our ProLiant servers (as shown on the left), and OpenBMC as well (while the one brought was still running the iLO Firmware as shown here on the right). It’s the first time it was ever demonstrated outside of a Lab, so big kudos to the team, and I’m sure lots of customers waiting for this will be very eager to ask for a test unit 😉
As usual Fosdem was crowdy. On Sunday, one way to test that is to go to the Janson auditorium, where keynotes happen. And when Jon Maddog is on stage, you can’t find a seat in it !!
Keynote of Jon Maddog Hall
It’s the first time I come without being a speaker, and that’s a bit more comfortable, as you don’t have to prepare material and deliver it, but as I am missing sharing info with others, I’ll try again next year to propose content, and I should have new one available for the audience. Stay tuned.
Happy 20th birthday to Fosdem, the greatest FLOSS event !
Time is flying, and the Workshop is like winter, coming ! We now have the agenda available so you should be even more keen to attend that free event in Lyon the 31st of october !!
It has also now been announced on the HPE Dev portal which should lead to more audience, especially as I can now announce that in addition to Jeff Autor, co-chair of the Redfish Forum, who will cover the lates news on the standard, you’ll also be lucky to hear from Gunnar Mills, who will talk about the new Redfish support added in OpenBMC 2.7 and the future 2.8 version. Full agenda should be published RSN !
And all that is free (as in beer) for you, as all costs are covered by HPE and SUSE, so at least if you can’t come, invite your friends to attend but it’s first come, first serve ! See you there.
Not only will I be speaking at the upcoming Open Source Summit later in october, but I’m also coordinating a co-located event, the second Redfish Workshop !
A replay of the US Redfish Workshop will be held Thursday, October 31, 2019 | 9:00am – 5:00pm at the Lyon Convention Centre, the day after the Open Source Summit Europe 2019 ends.
The Redfish Workshop is a one day event, with live demos that puts you in direct contact with Redfish
Project technical experts. Its primary aim is to show sysadmin,
architects and developers how to use the Redfish standard in their
environments to benefit from a standard management layer for their
deployments, configuration and management of systems.
Our knowledgeable and engaging speakers will help you better
understand topics like using DMTF tools for system configuration, using
the REST API to perform Redfish operations from python, learning latest
news on the standard and its future evolution, Through interactive
sessions, demos and labs, you’ll have a chance to network and better
understand and practice the concepts presented.
This is a free of charge event, sponsored by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and SUSE.
Who can benefit:
• System/Software Developers
• Tech Leads / Development Leads
• Software Architects
• Chief Engineers
• System Engineers
• Development Engineers
• DevOps / System Administrators
• Application Engineers
• Open Source Technologists
Our Keynote speaker will be Jeff Autor who will cover (at least !) the latest news since last year around the Redifsh standard.
For more information about the event please visit the Redfish Workshop page IMPORTANT: We have a limited number of seats available for this event so please register
And if you’ve expertise you want to share during this workshop, feel free to contact me, there is still room in the Agenda !
16:45-17:00 Round table at the end for a Q&A session – All
IMPORTANT
We have a limited number of seats available for this event so please ​register
The workshop has now been both announced by the Linux Foundation and HPE DEV so hopefully, we’ll see a raising number of inscriptions to it. If you’re interested by the topic, and are not far away from San Diego, please come !