Developers

Empowering Linux Developers for the New Wave of Innovation

Evan Dandrea — Fri, 13 Jul 2018 12:15:15 +0000

New businesses with software at their core are being created every day. Developers are the lifeblood of so much of what is being built and of technological innovation, and they are ever more vital to operations across the entire business. So why wouldn't we empower them?

Machine learning and IoT in particular offer huge opportunities for developers, especially those facing the crowded markets of other platforms, to engage with a sizeable untapped audience.

That Linux is open source makes it an amazing breeding ground for innovation. Developers aren’t constrained by closed ecosystems, meaning that Linux has long been the operating system of choice for developers. So by engaging with Linux, businesses can attract the best available developer skills.

The Linux ecosystem has always strived for a high degree of quality. Historically it was the Linux community taking sole responsibility for packaging software, gating each application update with careful review to ensure it worked as advertised on each distribution of Linux. This proved difficult for all sides.

Broad access to the code was needed, and open-source software could be offered through the app store. User support requests and bugs were channelled through the Linux distributions, and there was such a volume of reporting, it became difficult to feed information back to the appropriate software authors.

As the number of applications and Linux distributions grew, it became increasingly clear this model would not scale much further. Software authors took matters into their own hands, often picking a single Linux distribution to support and skipping the app store entirely. Because of this, they lost app discoverability and gained the complexity of running duplicative infrastructure.

This placed increased responsibility on developers at a time when the expectations of their role was already expanding. They are no longer just makers, they now bear the risk of breaking robotic arms with their code or bringing down MRI machines with a patch.

As an industry we acknowledge this problem—you can potentially have a bad update and software isn’t an exact science—but we then ask these developers to roll the dice. Do you risk compromise or self-inflicted harm?

Meanwhile the surface area increases. The industry continues a steady march of automation, creating ever more software components to plug together and layer solutions on. Not only do developers face the update question for their own code, they also must trust all developers facing that same decision in all the code beneath their own.

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Developer Interview: Ronald “wattOS” Ropp

Michael Reed — Mon, 25 Apr 2011 13:00:00 +0000

by Michael Reed

Biff Baxter, real name Ronald Ropp, is a technology consultant based in Portland, Oregon. He's also the developer behind wattOS, an Ubuntu derived Linux distribution (see our overview). We were quite impressed with wattOS, so we got in contact with him for some Q+A.

How did you get involved with Linux?

I got involved in Linux a long time ago. I loaded Slackware 1.1 from a CD (that I copied to floppies) in the back of a web server book that I bought in 1995. I was setting up my first web server, and I had an unused 486DX2 50MHz machine that I loaded it on. I had no UI, and I didn't not know what to do with it when done, but it worked. From there it grew, and I moved to RedHat for a year or two, then to SuSE for a while, then on to the wonderful world of Distro hopping. Everything from Slackware to Gentoo etc. I got involved in security and ISP and networking work and it was a perfect platform for that.

How did wattOS come about?

I grew frustrated with Windows 95 and the constant upgrade cycle, money required, memory, bloat, viruses, etc. I was taking old Dell Optiplex desktop machines and installing Vector Linux on them to make a fast secure simple platform for people to use. I would get a lot of 10 of them from a local recycler, install Vector Linux on them and sell them on eBay or simply give them to people.

What is the ethos behind wattOS?

The goal is to balance responsiveness, function and footprint and to maintain a somewhat minimalist interface so you do not lose a quick, efficient way to move around your apps and desktop space while not having to be a command line ninja to do so.

From the beginning, my intent for wattOS (which I first released in July 2008) was to create a simple, fast desktop that can leverage the large Debian/Ubuntu knowledge base and repositories. I've tried to keep it somewhat minimal, while being as functional as possible for the average user. I don't want them to have to do a ton of command line work just to do the basics such as web, email, music, video, print, photos, word processing, chat, etc.

I've also created (or included) some basic tools to help minimize power use. Additionally, there are a ton of systems sitting unused, in closets, being scrapped, etc that are perfectly functional, and people who do not have a lot of money would be thrilled to have them.

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SCALE: The Best Little-Big Open Source Conference

Miguel Hernandez — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 14:00:00 +0000

by Miguel Hernandez

The Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) is happening this weekend Feb. 25-27 and is, simply, awesome! I heard about it during its infancy but never even looked into it thinking it would be just as expensive as OSCON. Boy was I wrong! The first year I attended, it cost $60. This year the cost is $70. That's $70 for THREE days, which is a steal! Factor in the discounts provided to local open source user groups & it is downright highway robbery. You really cannot beat it.

Luminaries from across the open source universe abound. There are simply too many to list here. There will also be many open source-based companies on-hand hiring: Facebook, Google, eHarmony and Ticketmaster, to name but a few. There will be exhibitors ranging from local open source user groups to non-profits leveraging open source to make the world a better place to well-known linux distributions and everything in-between.

The events kick-off on Friday with some great tracks including DevOps, Build an Open Source Cloud Day, PostgreSQL Day, Fedora Activity Day, UbuCon, FOSS Mentoring and SCALE U.. Saturday and Sunday is the main conference with tracks for Open Source in Education (OSSIE), Beginners, Developers and System Administrators.

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