Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
An article by Gareth Eason, posted belatedly to this blog
My laptop has informed me that the wireless network has vanished, the low hum of the Cisco router fan is no longer to be heard, and the hundreds of attendees to this year's largest European Apache related event are bidding their friends goodbye and trickling out the conference room door. All that remains is to strip the gaffer-tape positioning and protecting the fibre running from the Burlington hotel to the nightclub next door - and take up the temporary cable that provided our link to the internet for the week.
Monday 26th June saw conference attendees from South Africa, America, Ireland, England, Wales, Scotland, Germany, Spain, France and many more descend with their laptops (or in the case of Ken, a veritable emporium of gadgets) on the Burlington Hotel, Dublin. The world's most prevalent webserver, Apache, was out to prove to Ireland that they had the most dedicated and also fun-loving community members of any open source project.
The first two days of the weeklong event were devoted to more in-depth sessions: a hackathon and workshops from the likes of Theo Schlossnagle who gave an excellent all-day session on how to build scaleable Internet architectures. Wednesday saw the start of ApacheCon proper, with the likes of Sun, Google, Thawte and Covalent, to mention but a few, setting up stands in the open area. Thanks to HEANet and the unwavering dedication of Colm MacCarthaigh and Nóirín Plunkett, we had a wireless network covering the entire conference area. The one and only shortcoming of the week was the shortage of mains electric sockets - but then again, it's not often that a conference has an absolute minimum of one laptop per person. Many of the participants blogged events as they occurred (including both myself, at http://www.signal2noise.co.uk/blog/ and Nóirín, at http://blog.nerdchic.net/ - photos at http://flickr.com/photos/noirin/ ) and many more wrote, updated and patched code in the Apache tree and related Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and Free Software Foundation (FSF) projects.
The 'Lightening Talks' were a highlight of the event for me. The series of strictly 5-minute talks, in an order drawn out of a hat, had subjects ranging from the highly technical to the almost bizarre. 'How to give a lightening talk' was, quite appropriately - if coincidentally - the first topic drawn, and was followed by such topics as 'Things on Ken's tool-belt.' Five-minute bite sized presentations on various technical subjects and diverse uses of Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and other Open Source Software (OSS) tools rounded out the event and made it entirely relevant to the audience - including Rich Bowen's excellent '10 things your webserver can do that you might not have known about.'
One of the prime aims of an event like ApacheCon is to bring some of the many developers and architects of the projects together in one physical place, so issues, ideas and problems can be discussed and resolved in a real-time, face-to-face forum. Each evening, Birds of a Feather (BOF) sessions provided a title, a room and an open-door policy to allow people to meet and discuss various technical and non-technical aspects of the work of the Apache Foundation. Subjects as diverse as 'Isn't it time that PHP played nice with Apache 2.0' and 'Women in Open Source Software' were discussed. I don't know that any solutions were arrived at, but perhaps solutions are secondary to education and awareness. Many of the attendees learned about the issues intrinsic to the creation of software for use in a global and diverse market - and keeping it free. More than any other aspect of the event, the BOF sessions demonstrated that the Apache Foundation is serious when they say it's not about the software, it's about the community.
The Apache community is not just about software, hardware, the varying implementations of the IP stack and creating brilliant solutions to complex problems - sometimes it's about having fun. The food and drink was excellent in the Burlington Hotel and although the schedule for each day was packed full of interesting and educational events to attend, people still found time to meet one and other and just talk. We organised a GPG cross-signed event, and Nick Bursh and I arranged that CACert ( http://www.cacert.org/ ) and Thawte ( http://www.thawte.com/ ) notarisations could take place, encouraging and spreading a free and open alternative to web security - a market currently dominated by a very few, expensive players. I also seem to have been drafted into the Open Streetmap project ( http://www.openstreetmap.org/ ) a project celebrating its second birthday in August, with the aim of providing an open source geographical map of the world, but with less restrictive licensing than the information from the current commercial map data sources. Check out the website ( http://www.openstreetmap.org/ ) and if you have a GPS (Global Positioning System) unit, join in the fun and contribute to what's already a very interesting project with a growing community.
It seems to me that wherever a large group of technical people are gathered, there also seems to be a selection of musically talented individuals, who seem happy to entertain the crowd with renditions of musical styles as diverse as the software and cultures represented. I felt privileged to join in and play along with the likes of Colm MacCarthaigh, N7oacute;irín Plunkett and Paul Fremantle. The sessions started late at night and continued well into the early morning. I was most impressed at the dedication of those people who still managed to get up in time for the 9am sessions the following days.
The software world of today is very different to that of even just a few years ago - and ApacheCon has changed to reflect that. Relatively new, but highly successful, is the 'Business Track' which targets CTOs, CIOs and those interested in using Free / Open Source Software (F/OSS) and in particular Apache Software Foundation (ASF) software in their businesses. Cliff Schmidt provided a whole day of sessions on the legal aspects of F/OSS, including an excellent overview on licensing, copyright law and the implications of these on development and use of software systems in today's business environment. While he is not a lawyer, he has a huge amount of experience in the field and an ability to impart many valuable lessons and anecdotes to the room full of interested listeners. I attended four hours of the lively discussions that his presentations rapidly turned into, and was disappointed that the schedule was just too packed for me to be able to attend more.
All good things must come to an end and I must join the mass exodus to the airport, for I have a flight to catch. I'm hoping I'll meet many of the people I met again at next year's ApacheCon and before that at SkyCon ( http://skycon.skynet.ie/ ) in February 2007.
More information on the talks and sessions, slide-sets and source code can be obtained at http://www.eu.apachecon.com/ along with information on the upcoming ApacheCon US and ApacheCon EU 2007. All the Apache Software Foundation software is available for download from http://www.apache.com/ along with tutorials, documentation and lots of other useful and interesting material.
