Googlers at Large

With May comes the annual ramp up of conference season, and Googlers who are part of the open source community will be giving talks and participating in events around the world over the next two months.

Last week, Jeremy Allison attended Samba XP, the 11th international Samba conference for users and developers in Göttingen, Germany speaking on "The Evolution of IO in Samba".

Our Chicago Google office will host past and present Google Summer of Code students and mentors along with students from DePaul, IIT, Northwestern, UChicago, and UIC Universities on May 23rd (Wednesday) for an evening of lightning talks delivered by accepted Google Summer of Code students and Google engineers. You can find all the details here, including how to register (pre-registration is required).

Chris DiBona will be speaking to the Open Cyber Security Roundtable in Menlo Park on May 30. The roundtable is part of a larger program to get more open source tools and apps into the security arsenal of federal, state and local government.

On June 12th, Cat Allman will be facilitating a session at the inaugural USENIX Women in Advanced Computing (WiAC) Summit. WiAC will take place as part of USENIX Federated Conferences Week (FCW) in Boston, MA.

Attendees and viewers of Google I/O coming June 27-29, 2012 in San Francisco will hear about a variety of Google’s open source projects, stay tuned to https://developers.google.com/events/io/ for more information on sessions. There will also be a dinner for GSoC Mentors hosted by Carol Smith in late June.

We hope to see you at one of these spring events!

By Cat Allman, Open Source Programs

Geek Time with Andrew Tridgell

Andrew Tridgell is a creator of Samba and rsync. Jeremy Allison, Samba co-creator and part of the Google Open Source Programs Office interviewed Andrew at the SambaXP 2011 conference for some quality Geek Time. The two have known each other for many years so there was plenty to talk about. Here are some highlights:

Jeremy asks Andrew how he feels as they approach 20 years of Samba. (0:38)

Andrew discusses what to expect from Samba 4. (1:58)

Andrew chats about the key focus of Samba in recent years. (3:05)

Jeremy asks Andrew to give highlights from his talk at Linux Conf Australia where he talked about the danger software patents pose to free software projects. (6:15)

Andrew talks about how he'd like to see a public forum for the free software community to talk about patent issues. (9:05)

Jeremy asks Andrew to discuss his transition from regular student to free software icon and how he recommends other developers get started in the free software community and become valuable contributors. (10:40)

Jeremy asks why not get started just by reading other people's code? (14:05)

Thanks to Fabian Scherschel of Sixgun Productions for operating the camera.

By Stephanie Taylor, Google Open Source Programs

Notes from SambaXP 2010

Hello, I’m Jeremy Allison, a Google engineer in the Open Source Programs Office and a Samba Team member. I recently returned from SambaXP, the annual Samba Team coding bash and get-together in Göttingen, Germany, held from May 5th - 7th. There were several notable outcomes from the conference, which I’ll share here.

We launched the new look for the samba.org web site at the conference, refreshing the Samba web site with a 21st Century design.

We listened to many presentations, had lots of meetings, and drank fine German beer. I gave a presentation on "How to make a product with Samba," (PDF of slides) aimed at helping companies use Samba in commercial products.

The Microsoft engineers who are working on the SMB (Server Message Block) and SMB2 file-sharing network protocols are Samba Team friends and they returned to the conference this year - in fact, Tom Talpey from Microsoft announced a new project to design UNIX extensions for the SMB2 protocol.

The Samba Team is still making great strides on the next release of Samba, Samba4. Samba creator Dr. Andrew Tridgell from IBM (just to be formal for once... everyone still just calls him "tridge") demonstrated two-way replication between a Microsoft Active Directory domain and a Samba4 Domain. There is still much work to be done on the AD domain controller code, but there is starting to be light visible at the end of the tunnel in getting to a "stable" 4.0 release. Maybe by SambaXP next year there will be an exciting new announcement on this subject.

After consultations with Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and Linux distributions, the Samba Team decided to move to a nine month period between major Samba releases instead of the previous six month release cycle. The strain of keeping to the six monthly cycle was too great on the release process, and nine months should give a better balance between having time for feature development and time for testing of the Samba production release code.

Plans for the merging of the existing file server (smbd) and authentication daemon code (winbindd) with the Active Directory code (samba) were made, and tridge demonstrated Samba4 printing for the first time.

Günther Deschner from Red Hat won the "Code Janitor of the Year" award yet again, for his clean up of the old printing code, and was only just beaten to the post as the top code commit contributor into Samba by Stefan "the Machine" Metzmacher from SerNet.

John Terpstra of Primastasys announced the clean up of the Samba.org support page as part of the new look for the Samba.org web site. John will be ensuring all companies offering Samba support on the site are kept up to date for users to contact.

Thanks to Google for sponsoring the event, and SerNet for hosting. The slides from all the presentations are available here. If you didn't go, you were missed - and you should certainly make an effort to be there next year!

By Jeremy Allison, Open Source Team

Growing Up with Samba

Next month Samba eXPerience 2010, the ninth international Samba conference for users and developers, will be held in Göttingen, Germany from May 3rd - 7th. Jeremy Allison, who works in the Google Open Source Programs Office, will be at the conference to hack on Samba and present his talk, “How to make a product with Samba” at 1:30 - 2:15 pm, Thursday May 6th (volcano ash permitting). His talk will cover the advantages and problems of using Samba in a storage product, and how to work with the Samba developer community.

The theme for this year’s conference is “Growing Up,” and Jeremy notes that at SambaXP 2010, “Microsoft engineers will be attending and giving a keynote at the conference for the second year running, which shows how important Microsoft now considers interoperability with Free Software projects.”

To get more of Jeremy’s thoughts on open source, you can read his columns or talk to him in Germany!

by Ellen Ko, Open Source Team

Hacking Zurich

By Leslie Hawthorn, Open Source Team

Many things wonderful and Open Source are happening in Zurich, Switzerland these days. Most recently, Joël Fisler of the OLAT (Online Learning and Training) project wrote in to let us know about the meetup held at the University of Zurich to celebrate the conclusion of Google Summer of Code™ 2008. Joel writes:

2008 was the first year that the OLAT Learning Management System (LMS) and e-Learning Markup Language (eLML) were accepted into the Summer of Code program. All the students successfully finished their projects and presented their work at our program closing party. After two hours of presentations and discussions — one as a conference call from Germany and two students via video from India — the student and mentors celebrated with barbecue and beer until late at the Irchel campus. The presentations are available online as video streams.

OLAT's 6.1.x release will contain the results of Udit Sajjanhar's iCal Calendar Feed project, as well as Maurus Rohrer's work on an OLAT LDAP authentication module. The code from OLAT's two eLML student projects, Thomas Linowsky's eLML template generator and Alberto Sanz's work on DocBoook conversion for eLML lessons, will be released later this month. We're anticipating that the work done by our other four students, Thomas Bernhart, Sergio Trentini, Marcel Karras and Mayank Jain, will be published in our 6.2 release, and we're already prototyping against their code.

It's not all Summer of Code and barbecue, though. The OpenExpo Conference kicks off this week on Wednesday, September 24th, and our very own Brian "Fitz" Fitzpatrick will be delivering Do You Believe in the Users? on Thursday morning. Finally, some of the organizers of OpenExpo are also spearheading Hackontest, a 24 hour programming competition between teams developing for three Open Source projects as selected by community participants via online voting. Developer teams will work furiously to add features to OpenLieroX, sK1 and TYPO3, with the results of the 24 hour sprint reviewed by a panel of celebrity judges from the Open Source community. Fitz will be on hand to weigh in, as will Google Open Sourcerers Jeremy Allison of the Samba project, Alexander Limi, co-creator of Plone and Bram Moolenaar, author of Vim.

Should you find yourself in the area, please stop in to say hello. If not, Happy Hacking wherever you might find yourself!

Open Source Googlers at Large

By Cat Allman, Open Source Team

There is lots going on in May, starting this week with Connectathon in San Jose, California, USA from Thursday, May 8th through Thursday, May 15th. Samba guy Jeremy Allison will be taking part Monday - Thursday in this network proving ground which allows vendors to test their interoperability solutions, with special emphasis on NFS and Internet protocols.

On Wednesday, May 14th BSDCan, an annual gathering of 4.4BSD based operating systems developers, kicks off in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada with two days of tutorials, followed by 2 days of talks, including one by our own Leslie Hawthorn on Google Summer of Code™, currently under way for it's fourth year.

The Summer of Code goodness doesn't stop there: other past GSoCers also speaking include past mentors Poul-Henning Kamp speaking on "Measured (almost) does Air Traffic Control", and Pawel Jakub Dawidek on the ZFS file system. Past student participant Constantine A. Murenin will be speaking on the past and present history of OpenBSD's hardware sensors framework, and Ivan Voras will be present on "finstall" - the new FreeBSD installer he's began working on as a Summer of Code project in 2007.

It shouldn't be too hard to find members of the Open Source Team if you're in San Jose or Ottawa over the next few days. Stop by, introduce yourself and let us know what's on your mind.

Ed. note: updated post with corrected typo.