Extensive Coverage of Ottawa Linux Symposium 2006

cdlu writes "LWN and NewsForge both extensively covered the goings-on at this year's OLS. NewsForge: day 1, day 2, day 3, and day 4. LWN (subscription required for most): article 1, article 2, article 3, and article 4." I especially enjoyed the description of reverse engineering a USB device from cdlu's coverage of day 3; one day wireless USB devices will really work with out-of-the-box Linux! Update: 07/25 04:57 GMT by T : Eric Preston, who delivered that talk on reverse engineering USB devices, kindly linked to both his slides and the accompanying screenshots.

Comments

Why Don't they advertise in Ottawa?

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the papers and listen to radio here in Ottawa. I run Linux on my machine and have helped my girlfriend and her little daughter switch as well, we're the sort who'd like to have known that this was going on. But not a peep.

Was there advertising in 'trade' papers that I just didn't see? Or is this basically a convention for out-of-towners with no seats for 'off the street' folks? More of a 'Linux Symposium' (held in Ottawa) than an 'Ottawa Linux Symposium' I'd say... heh.

Kevin

Re:road hazard ahead...

[kscguru]

The stability of a driver is a function of how many useful bug reports get into the hands of the developer who wrote the driver. Linux survives because Linux has far more developers - any kernel hacker can fix a problem, but almost no end-user problems ever get fixed (hence, mom and pop hate Linux because their grips don't get fixed, nor even heard). On Windows, there are fewer developers, but Microsoft (despite their faults) has done much better about getting error reports to the people who can fix the bugs. My employer makes great use of the Windows error reporting tools.

The Linux community does a good job of getting reasonably clean code into Linux. But in the process, they have adopted a horrific Not Invented Here complex - getting new code into Linux is a multi-month process at best (and multi-year if there's not a core kernel hacker championing the code). Windows is sufficiently modular that it's just a matter of loading a new driver - sometimes the new driver is good and sometimes it's crap. But Microsoft doesn't demand that developers run only officially blessed sources (module non-GPL tainting), receive two tons of junk mail, and get flamed by seven people with three mutually contradictory gripes, two of whom are flaming only for political Code Wants To Be Free(tm) reasons.

Windows drivers got much better when they started getting more user-generated bug reports by providing automated tools to collect such reports. (Admittedly, an approach started by Mozilla.) Open source code has nothing to do with it. And the Linux community would do well to learn from that example.

Take your strawman and go sit in the corner.

[Anonymous Coward]

Nobody wants vendors to release drivers. We don't want them, and we never will want them. Simply supply the docs they already have, and let us make drivers. We will support their hardware for them, for free, and it will always be up to date, always work out of the box, and always be consistant with other similar hardware for users. Quit re-hashing the same stupid excuses that have nothing to do with reality.

Re:pretty good place

[Millenniumman]

I accept your second point, and begin working on it. I'll upload the changed source code for the plant's DNA on sourceforge.
I must argue your first point.

Black tea is red. You could call it brown, but you could also call GNU, Unix.

White tea isn't brown at all.

Green tea isn't either.

Oolong tea isn't and has a respectable amount of caffeine.

Re:Demanding programming specifications

[TheRaven64]

I've just read the thread you linked to, and clicked on the Hifn link. There were only a few replies in there that I would class as flames, and they got jumped on pretty quickly. The upshot? I revised my intention to buy a (Hifn-chip-based) Soekris VPN board to go in my OpenBSD embedded firewall. I have no intention of stopping using OpenBSD, but Hifn have lost a customer until this is resolved.

I am glad to see some people in the Linux community standing up for open documentation, for a change. The primary reason I use Free Software is that I don't like vendor lock-in. Once you start allowing binary blobs in the kernel, you are right back where you started, hoping the manufacturer will keep supporting your device and not just leave a few bugs in to encourage you to upgrade.