CommunityOne: Bringing Communities Together

Last year saw the birth of CommunityOne, a free full-day event that preceded the 2007 JavaOne conference and set the tone for a full week of presentations, demonstrations, and knowledge sharing by and for the open-source community. Celebrating its second appearance, this year's CommunityOne was even bigger and better than last year's version.

The event, sponsored by Sun, brought together a large and diverse gathering of many of the leading-edge open-source communities, over triple the number of communities attending last year's CommunityOne event. "Large and diverse" also characterized the agenda. CommunityOne offered over 70 technical sessions in 12 tracks ranging from Chip Multithreading/OpenSPARC to Web and Application Servers -- all highlighting the challenges and successes of community-based open-source projects.

Running parallel to the 12 tracks were a RedMonk unconference that offered sessions conceived of and run in an open, participatory, community-driven style, and another unconference called StartUp Camp that focused on getting entrepreneurs in startups to share ideas. Over 3000 people attended the CommunityOne event, including students from 80 countries.

Sun's vice president of developer and community marketing, Ian Murdock, started the day with a keynote session that set the theme for the day: Innovate, Collaborate, and Integrate. Clearly, the community, or rather communities, have reshaped the computer industry and will continue to do so in new and innovative ways.

To underscore the power of collaboration, Sun CEO and president Jonathan Schwartz, in a brief appearance onstage, asked the audience to think of the Amazon river. "You can look at the Amazon as this enormous powerful force of nature, but in truth, it's not one river. It's the composition of 10,0000 smaller rivers, each of them lending their own capacity, volume, and force of energy to something much bigger."

But collaboration, especially if it involves many contributors, does have its downside. Customers want to tap into the power of the community, but they don't want to deal with the complexity of technology that comes from multiple sources. This has spurred the rise of aggregators and integrators such as Dell and Red Hat.

Murdock said that these companies provide a valuable role: "They deliver the complex but powerful world of community technology to the market in the form that the market can digest." But this service to customers presents a challenge to contributors.

Murdock framed the challenge as a series of questions. "What's the role of the small independent developer in this world? Are we going back to monolithic structure in the pursuit of simplicity? What's the right balance between integration and choice and flexibility?"

Murdock made the point that open source and the communities behind it are the core of Sun's business today. He said that Sun is attempting to strike the right balance. On the one hand, Sun is committed to fostering the community model and open-source software. On the other, it's focused on developing modular architectures, where developers can contribute to core platforms with leading-edge technologies -- whether those technologies are packages, plug-ins, extensions, or adapters. This bilateral approach can benefit the core platform as well as the independent developer.

An engrossing sidelight to Murdock's keynote was a panel discussion titled "A Multitude of Models, How Communities Work." Led by Matt Asay, general manager and vice president of Alfresco and a prolific blogger on open-source topics, the panel included community luminaries such as Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation; Mike Evans, vice president of community development at Red Hat; Jeremy Allison, the Samba project lead at Google; Mårten Mickos, Sun senior vice president for databases and former CEO of MySQL; Ted Leung, Sun Microsystems principal engineer and Python project lead; and Stormy Peters, OpenLogic's director of community and partner programs.

The panel discussed a wide range of questions such as "Who makes up various communities such as MySQL?" and "Is there a tension between satisfying the needs of code contributors and satisfying the needs of a business?" The speakers encouraged audience members to participate in the discussion by posting questions through the social blogging tool Twitter. This led to some interesting technical questions -- but also to a humorous one: "Did Jeremy [Allison] dress like Steve Jobs on purpose?"

Perhaps the biggest announcement of the day came from Rich Green, Sun's executive vice president for software, in his talk titled "Be Brilliant Faster." Green announced the fully supported release of the OpenSolaris operating system. Created through worldwide community collaboration, the OpenSolaris OS is an example of what the open-source model can accomplish. The leading-edge operating system allows users to fully install and customize their open-source OS deployment quickly and easily.

To demonstrate this, Sun Distinguished Engineer Stephen Hahn showed how easy and fast it is to fully install OpenSolaris from a LiveCD distro. The operating system installed in less than 15 minutes.

Some other cool demos ensued, and the highlight was a dramatic demonstration of the ZFS data recovery feature. Armed with a sledgehammer and a drill, Sun Fellow and Solaris chief technologist Jim Hughes and his partner in destruction, Sun Distinguished Engineer and chief architect of ZFS Jeff Bonwick, did fatal damage to two hard drives that were connected to a processor. Green quipped that this was true "hard drive compression." Hughes and Bonwick then used ZFS to quickly recover the data from a backup onto a new pair of drives.

Download the OpenSolaris OS for free from the OpenSolaris web site.

It was impossible to go to all of the sessions during this event, and space doesn't permit coverage of what I saw and learned during these sessions. Needless to say, all the sessions I attended had standing-room-only crowds, were very interesting, and had many cool demonstrations. You can watch videos of the general sessions and many of the technical sessions on the CommunityOne web site.

As content-rich as these sessions are, going to an event such as CommunityOne is more than sitting in on talks. There's also the great value you get in meeting people, learning about their experiences and their work, and the infectiousness of their enthusiasm. Bringing vibrant, creative, enthusiastic, fun people together -- that's what CommunityOne is all about.